Just in time for the 10:00 deadline for breakfast, I caught the elevator on the 3rd floor to go down to the 8th floor, which is different from the 8th floor above the 7th for some reason. In this 8th floor just below zero, lays the restaurant area. The restaurant is a vast buffet-optimized room capable of feeding many people.
The obvious happened: at 10 minutes before closing time, you could not possibly gather more than one coffee-spoon of "mixed eggs" from the serving place. Bread stock was low, and you could detect several hundreds of starving hotel guests had been in the premises by looking at the disposition of some items, like fruit, milk jars, scattering of corn flakes, precision of cake cuts, number of abandoned toasted bread slices, etc.. The typical scenario for this time of the morning.
But one interesting breakfast asset caught my eye! The Bread-Toaster 2000! I know we are in the XXI century, and nobody names innovative kitchen-of-the-future items as "2000" anymore.. Maybe in 50 years we get to witness the birth of the "2100" naming, but I thing "2000" fits this bread toaster better than any other "3000" labeling..
Anyway, the ingenious bread toaster sparkled my engineering interest because of the way it toasts bread: this mass toasting device was a metallic conveyor belt where the hungry and impatient guest places his bread slices. Two bread slices fit side-by-side on the belt, under the constant heating action of the top-placed toasting resistors. The bread slices are slowly rolled deeper inside the oven chamber, becoming evermore unreachable. This slow process allows for enough time to go re-fill your cup with milk and go choose your other ingredients with which to complete your customized toast recipe.
When finally the toasting process finishes, the slices of lightly warmed, minimally-crocking break fall on the deepest corner of the machine, where gravity pushes them down a ramp that redirects them to just below the conveyor belt, available for pick-up by their owner. Finally, the second part in the customization of your toast can initiate, when you combine all the collected ingredients in your most favorable way. However, it can happen, that a frustrated user, starving for food (thus not particularly starving for toasts), may forget about his re-baked bread slice. This generates a mild number of abandoned toasts that subsequent people tend not to reuse to their advantage when already cold. (By "cold" here I mean about 10 degrees C below oven-ready temperature as they don't come out that hot, really: toasted and untoasted bread slices are indistinguishable by color)
Thursday, December 25, 2008
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