Death Stove from Mordor

You do not need to see his business card to know that my husband is an engineer. Why? Because engineering is not a mere profession. It is a state of mind. A state of soul. A state in which, whereas my power animal might be--say--a bobcat, their power animal is a steam engine, a band saw, a transistor array. I walk into a garage or workshop and think, "Oh, this place smells like a garage or workshop." He walks in, sniffs the air and says, "I wonder who was just using 90-weight motor oil?"

We bought an old house recently, which contains an old commercial stove--a metal mammoth wider than I am tall, and taller than I am tall, and covered in decades worth of crud. It must weigh upwards of 1000 pounds. It is so large that raccoons could be nesting behind it and I wouldn't even know. It has no safety features whatsoever and each of its many grime-encrusted ovens, grills, burners, etc. has its own ancient, tremulous pilot light. It has a multitude of scum-crusted fire-blackened open burners so deep that if you dropped your match when trying to light them, you could count to two or three before you'd hear it hit the bottom.

Should you ever need to cook an entire cow, come to my house--but don't stand too close to the stove, because its walls are uninsulated and it will set you on fire. Then the kitchen's hard-wired fire suppression system will kick in and coat you and the entire kitchen in five inches of fluffy white chemicals. As an alternate method of dealing with being on fire, you could throw the switch on the enormous vent hood to have it suck you up and spit you out into the yard. (If you're still on fire when you land, try rolling around on the grass.)

That's my view of the stove. It belongs in Mordor. It was probably made in Mordor, though I can't be sure since all identifying marks were paved over with petrified layers of incinerated food. My ambition for it is to find a restaurant owner (or perhaps an orc, dragon or troll) who will pay me for the privilege of coming over and taking it out of my house, so that I can cook without having to wear a welding visor.

 
But my husband's view is different. "Oh WOW!" he says. He brings over his engineer friend and they stand in the kitchen, hands on hips, saying, "That is just PHENOMENAL! Oh, you can't get rid of that!" When I point out the grime, he and the other engineer helpfully suggest, "Oh, we'll just take it apart and bathe it in muriatic acid." Wait, what? How? "We'll just build some troughs in the basement and disassemble it--obviously we'll make a schematic to show where all the parts came from--and when we put it back together you'll be good to go!"

Men who never cook on anything but a microwave exclaim, "Oh, but this stove is a major benefit! You would almost buy the house just for that!" What's the benefit, I wonder? Well, in addition to cooking (in a welding visor) for upwards of thirty people at once, they explain, "We could probably put parts in there and use it to bake on coatings!" Parts of what? Just "parts," apparently. Parts of whatever mechanisms and inventions they may make in the future.

I may have to take it apart myself and smuggle it out of the house, piece by piece. But my husband would probably find it. He and his engineer friends would feel its clunk and hiss in their bones. They would smell it on the wind: rancid cooking oil, ancient lubricant, burnt food, a whiff of gas. They would track it down, lovingly bathe it in muriatic acid, and bring it home.