So my sister's shown lately that her competency with the microwave borders on dangerous. A while back, she was cleaning the microwave. Following my mom's example, she put a measuring cup full of water in the microwave to boil for a little bit so it would steam the microwave out. That would've been just fine, but she set it to boil and then left for a while. By the time she got back, she decided to run it again. I don't know if she didn't check any of it or what, but something in that microwave was too hot. I'm unclear on exactly how it happened, but she had to remove the measuring cup from the microwave with a towel. First she set it on the counter, which burned the counter a bit, then she took it outside and set it on the porch, where it shattered while cooling. The microwave plate suffered a crack.

Today, that crack finally won out and the plate split in half. Until we can get a new plate, she took the smaller plate from the microwave she used while living in the dorms and put it in our microwave. It hadn't even been in there twelve hours when she decided to wax. She put the plastic jar of wax in the microwave. Now, the directions say 30 seconds, but she didn't read those. She put it in for two minutes. The hot wax melted a hole in the bottom of the jar and spread over the entire plate.

The sticky cleanup lasted an hour and I just got back. We tried a variety of things that finally managed to get the smooth surfaces pretty much clean, but there wasn't a whole lot we could do with the textured surfaces on the back. We put the plate in our dishwasher, which will hopefully be enough to melt and remove the wax, particularly with the steam clean feature. My hands and arms still have sticky spots of wax on them.

That girl needs a sense of how long to microwave things...