... turn a toaster oven on its side to cook pizza?

I'm trying to picture this, but my brain says no.

I'll bring the beer, though.

That's a very small pizza.

Or a very big toaster

In the US of A it would be both a big pizza and a big toaster in super-size-me format.

Well if you put the pizza in the normal way, all the topping is just going to slide down to the bottom of the toaster.

No that would happen in you used a toaster, a toaster oven has a horizontal opening and looks similar to a microwave oven.

And one of those wire-conveyor-belt toasters you find in hotel breakfast buffets is the perfect tool to reheat last night's left over pizza.

All the ones I've seen, the toast comes out the opposite way up from how the bread went in.

Which way up do you put the pizza in?

If it's last nights pizza, it doesn't matter

After a little trial and error, we figured out how to set a 40 foot multi-zone belt furnace (nominally used to cook hybrid circuitry) to make chocolate chip cookies. Including the mandatory cooling time ... when they came out the far end they were just warm to the touch, and ready for eating :-)

Elfin safety can kiss my pasty white butt; I don't need protecting from myself.

Hey, hold my beer & watch this! ::sweeps cookie crumbs off floor with liquid nitrogen::

We had a chestnut program for the SMD reflow oven for perfectly roasted chestnuts.

I'm more intrigued by what would happen when the toaster finished toasting and tried to eject the pizza across the room...

You position yourself about 6ft away opposite the toaster with your mouth open of course.

Decades of watching cartoons has shown me how to deal with these tricky situations.

Presumably to stop the cheesy goodness sliding into the crumb tray underneath

Just to clarify, this is a toaster oven:

https://www.amazon.com/Hamilton-Beach-Countertop-Toaster-Roll-Top/dp/B06WGNC8Q4

And this is a toaster:

https://www.amazon.com/Mecity-Countdown-Functions-removable-Stainless/dp/B09V7SZK2X

Completely different beasties.

I don't know why you would want to turn a toaster oven on it's side to cook a pizza. The ones I've seen are large enough to cook at least a small pizza while the right way up.

Still, we are talking about a society where the Fire Brigade have had to ask students not to cook cheese on toast in toaster.. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/toaster-grilled-cheese-fire-avery-hill-jamie-oliver-b1060242.html

Next you'll be trying to tell us we shouldn't have tried to cook soup in a kettle.

Actually, from how every cup of tea after that tasted I think we learnt our lesson, which was "trying to cook things when you get back home hammered at 4am is not always a good idea..."

If you regularly have a need for a cup or two (a liter or so) of boiling stock, the investment in a second electric kettle for the purpose is worth it. Ask anyone who know how to cook.

Mine is painted bright yellow with red & orange flames, and a warning "not for water" stencil.

I agree, this makes little sense

Had something similar happen, but it was cleaners who kept forgetting about the alarm to the front door of the building that contained the DC. Each time it went off, the police would get a call and they would have to come out to see what's happening. After a while, they just stopped attending.

They never brought Pizza with them though - they just used to try and get food/drinks off us!

I'll file the cooking pizza in the toaster idea with cooking rice in the kettle.

While I think about it, I wonder if popcorn in the kettle might work?

"I wonder if popcorn in the kettle might work?"

Not an electric kettle, no, but one for the hob should work nicely ... assuming the "water in" opening is large enough to properly vent steam.

NOTE! That is NOT how kettle-corn is made! Don't say I didn't warn you & etc.

Icon for effect. Old boss story. (Really).

Weekend change window to change some card in a customer data centre router. Brings his 3yo in for the quick 5 minute swap job. Boss (yes, boss) doing his thing then all of a sudden there was a disturbance in The Force. Hundreds of racks, initially crying out in terror and were suddenly silenced (all of the devices in the DC all went quiet).

3yo boy decides the facility emergency power off button was pretty and needed to be pressed.

This is exactly why Molly Guards exist.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/molly-guard

Molly Guards don't work when you've got a smart kid.

Many moons ago I took my daughter to SLAC on take your kid to work day. At the ripe old age of 9, she had been there many times before and knew the ropes, but I figured she deserved a day out of school.

She told me as we were walking in that it'd cost me ten bucks for her to not push any buttons. I gave her the money.

On the way back out, I told her that it'd cost her ten bucks for me not to tell her mother she was running a protection racket. She made a face and paid up ... and promptly told her mother as soon as we got home. They both still laugh about it :-)

Ha! Not an IT emergency, I can go one better on that, and I was the young boy in question. Back when I was a young boy, my dad was going to school full time, and working full time. This made for little time for recreation and spending time with me. One Saturday he combined both, we ended up at the local liquor store... Liquor in the front, poker in the back! My dad got sucked into a few hands of poker with the owner and some locals, I was free to roam the stock room. Being bored, I popped the tops of a case of canned beer while the guys played cards. Needless to say, my dad and his friends had a case of beer to drink before it went flat... I don't remember doing the deed, but I was reminded of it by Johnny, the owner of the shop many times through out my advancing childhood. However, this gave me the sense to keep my hands in my pockets when I first entered IT...

While working in a "secure" local gov location we had a overly sensitive motion detector that would be set off by wind on the windows or flying insects. Being part of the children's panel police were called out on a regular basis until it was permanently disconnected.

Also similar, we couldn't work out why the intruder alarm was going off occasionally between 06:00 and 06:30 on weekdays. We tracked it down to happening in the main office then realised they'd hung a world map (one of the ones with a batten top and bottom, hung with a bit of string) above a large radiator. When the heating came on the rising warm air would sometimes be sufficient to lift the bottom of the map and trigger the motion detector. As we'd reached the end of our unofficial "free police call out" allowance, i.e. next time they wouldn't attend, we were relieved to solve the problem.

Ew.

I hope he washed his hands.

One place I worked had so many false alarms, mostly due to easily contained toaster fires, the fire brigade refused point blank to turn up until someone had visually confirmed there was an actual fire.

As a reuslt, every time the alarm went of, several trusted memebers of staff would run to the area noted on the panel and look for smoke...

That toaster incident seems to resonate: I remember an evacuation of our clean room production facility (this is a costly exercise...) due to a gormless employee cooking something in a toaster that had no place in there, I believe it was something unhealthy inside its plastic wrapper.

The stink lingered a while in the lunch room even after the incident.

I worked in a shared office many moons ago and late one morning the faint whiff of starting to burn bread product wafted into the office shortly followed by the fire alarm going off. Of course everyone did as they should and got out leaving whatever slightly charred bread product in whatever was charring it. The fire brigade turned up and finally put it out of its misery but by that time it was now fully charred. You could smell it in pretty much every common area of the floor for about a week after.

Worked with a dev who couldn't quite work out how to use our toaster. After he set off the fire alarm for the second time, causing the building to be evacuated for the second time and the fire brigade to be called out for the second time, we confiscated the toaster. Problem solved! Oh yes, his code was cr@p too.

Where I work, we have a couple of full size server rooms. These are large, air conditioned (kept at around 4 or 5 celsius all year. Thankfully, the company provides branded parkas for the techs working in there.

Apparently for security, and (I assume) to prevent Halon escapes, each room is protected by a sort of airlock arrangement. We enter the server room through a small room, where the parkas are stored. We use our swipe card to open the door from the corridor into the small room, then have to push a button to open the door to the server room. Neither door will unlock if the other is open. These server rooms are in other buildings.

We also have three servers in our own data/patch room. Two are hooked up to a network that, for security reasons, is only available in our building and has no outside access. The third runs the CCTV cameras in the building.

One day, we had a power failure. The power was out for a couple of hours, which was actually quite boring. Working in tech support, there isn't much of my job that doesn't require electricity.

When the power came back on, me and my team spent the next hour or so bringing everything back online, and making sure it was working (we don't usually power most of our computers down)

After we finished, I went into our data room for something else. I noticed the servers were off, so I turned the ones I knew about on. Then, I found a server I didn't recognise, and it was displaying "Keyboard not found: Press F1 to continue". As I didn't recognise it (I'd been off work when it was installed), I asked around. My boss said he didn't know what it was, so, getting worried now, I asked one of my colleagues. After all, while the room was as secure as we could make it, if you don't recognise any machine in a server room, that *is* a red flag.

My colleague asked for a photo, as he wasn't in the building so couldn't just pop in to see it. When I sent him one, he replied. "That's your CCTV server" and mentioned that my boss was directly responsible for it, so should have made sure it was working. I went to get a keyboard, plugged it in, pressed "F1" and it booted. No idea if we had anything stolen that day, but if we did, the CCTV cameras would not have caught it.

The keyboard was stolen...

We commissioned a large set of equipment at a big water-treatment works. Big job, full day so we started very early and I had a plan for breakfast on-site as they had a good kitchen. I had a student/trainee with me who was keen to help and we set him off to buy the necessary foodstuffs from the local shop. There were four people in our team.

He returned with ten packs of bacon, four packs of butter, eggs galore and a bread-van load equivalent. A few fishes and we could have fed the region. We started cooking our well-deserved breakfast.....the aroma was unmistakable. It was surprising how many of the site staff 'were just passing by' and helped themselves to a breakfast 'snack' or two. The toaster needed a full-time attendant.

The site staff were keen on us prolonging our site presence or perhaps 'visit again next week to check everything is OK?'

One of my former employees had a DC where a couple of staff worked at a desk within the DC itself. It was quite noisy in there but not deafening, however the white noise could be a bit irritating at times. Especially if you were working in there on your own. Normally the place was unstaffed on a weekend, but one member of staff had some overtime to do. Since he was in the building alone he decided to listen to some music. He was wearing a set of cans with the volume turned up nice and loud. Unknown to him the fire alarm sounder in the DC was broken, otherwise he'd have been able to hear the fire alarm over his music. Yep the fire alarm was going off.

He noticed a flashing light over by the stairwell. The light was the doorbell for the back entrance to the DC. Nobody ever rang that doorbell so it took him a while to notice it and then to realise it meant there was somebody at the door. He got up and wandered downstairs, when he opened the stairwell door the fire alarm was audible even over Metallica. He trotted downstairs and opened the door to find a fire fighter about to take the door down with an axe.

Turns out that the alarm was bogus. According to the fire alarm company somehow the failed sounder had triggered the alarm.

Not very IT related, but it was just before going off to UNI in the mid 70's. I had a job as a night porter in a large hotel in Norwich. At one point we had a film crew in and they all appeared one moring at 5am demanding breakfast. The duty manager had sloped off with his girlfriend so it was left to myself and another raw recuit to fry up bacon, eggs and make some toast. There was a huge toaster machine that would do a couple of dozen slices at a time that I asked the other guy to start up and get the slices ready for the crew. Sadly he thought it would be quicker if he moved it to to the middle of the kitchen - just under the fire detection system. Cue a whole hotel fire alarm, fire engines, police and lots of very angry guests in night clothes milling around. We had a talking to and actually thanked for trying to help out but that we shouldn't have had to try to make breakfast and never saw that manager again.

Staying in Croyde, Devon one year and the toaster had the following above it:

Please do not change the settings on the toaster as this will set the fire alarm off.

Still makes me chuckle.

I think it was Ben Elton many moons ago did a skit about a disgruntled graduate who ended up designing toasters while all of their friends from uni went to cool jobs. Their revenge on the world was if you set the toaster to anything over 4 it will burn your f-ing house down!

halon being a very bad thing for humans

I might be wrong, but halon as such is not really harmful for humans. Of course, some products from reactions between burning stuff and halon I wouldn't want to breath in, but there'd usually still be enough time to safely escape a danger zone after the release of halon. However, I wouldn't necessarily want to experience the release of high pressure halon as this might be rather unpleasant (even if not terribly harmful).