It was Sunday night and everything was going swell. We were just sitting down to watch the Sopranos. My husband had some crappy excuse for beef stroganoff TV dinner heating up in the microwave. Several minutes into the show, we both went to the kitchen for a snack. He took his half cooked TV dinner from the microwave, stirred it, put it back in and pressed start. The silence was deafening. He pressed start several more times and still nothing happened. I pressed start, knowing that sometimes I do things better than he does. Even my expertise with the button did nothing. We both stood there looking over our plates of uncooked food. He, with his black microwaveable cardboard filled with still frozen "near-meat" chunks of "beef" surrounded by what looked like mud and crisp noodles and me with my solid chunk of cheese lined up on the counter, waiting to be nuked into dip. We looked down at our food, then over at the dead microwave, at each other, and back to our uncooked food. We were sad. The Sopranos sat patiently, paused and waiting for us to solve this earth shattering dilemma. After what seemed like minutes of shock and uncertainty, we realized that we could probably cook these things some other way, using something else as a heat source. We opened up the drawers in the kitchen and found metal container things with handles on them. We put our foods into them. Next we placed these pots onto that big thing in the kitchen. The thing with the burners on it. It took a long time. Much longer than the microwave. It was hard. We got a new microwave the next day.