The Recital Toaster
A toaster that marks the completion of your toast with a short brass fanfare, played approximately three minutes after the toast is done.
The toasting is unremarkable. Two slots, a browning dial, the usual quiet click of the timer. What distinguishes the machine is the six-second brass fanfare it plays to celebrate a completed slice, and the fact that this fanfare has been deliberately delayed by three minutes, in the interests of ceremony.
The manufacturer is unapologetic about this. A fanfare at the moment of readiness, they argue, is merely a notification, and notifications are the enemy of occasion. Three minutes later, the toast is on a plate, the butter is out, the household has dispersed, and the sudden arrival of triumphant brass in an empty kitchen restores to breakfast a grandeur it has not had since the invention of the toaster.
In practice the effect is more complicated. Because the delay is fixed and the toasting time is not, the fanfare regularly plays during somebody else's turn, celebrating a slice that has already been eaten, which the makers call polyphonic breakfast and everybody else calls the problem.
There is no off switch. There is a volume dial, which goes from LOUD to CONSIDERABLE. The instruction manual notes, without further comment, that the machine has never once played its fanfare into a room that contained anybody who wanted to hear it.
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