My Toaster is Better than Yours

I’m embarrassed to admit, but for my entire life, I owned a boring run of the mill toaster. My only criteria were price and whether it could fit a bagel!

What was I doing with my life? because I certainly wasn’t living until I opened the box on my Brotmeister Klassik.

The BK is manufactured in a facility outside Heidelberg by a team of 12 charring experts and 1 NASA scientist (who apparently left the space program because this work was more technologically challenging). Don’t bother looking it up; it doesn’t have a website or social media. If you want one, you must send a gift under $100 to an unlisted address in the Netherlands, and if they find your gift pleasing, you will be placed on a 3 year waitlist. Which they can manipulate at their discretion.

Once you are selected to participate in the ownership of a Brotmeister, you must send a money order for $1500 to a Cayman Island banking institution, and upon its acceptance you will receive a single card from a stranger when you are least expecting it in embossed sans-serif that reads, Sie sind bereit. (You are ready.)

Due to my NDA, I can’t explain how the Brotmeister Klassik is delivered. But I can tell you it does not toast. It converses with the bread. You see, according to the manual “Bread is alive”. Not metaphorically, literally and when you put that bread into a standard consumer toaster, you are not toasting it. You are murdering it.

The engineers at BK pride themselves on extracting the soul, aka Feuchtigkeitsseele, from the bread so it might be digested as humanely and deliciously as possible. All while keeping in mind the Das Babyhaar (the Crust). Then, and only then, does it apply heat. Intentionally.

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After a week of using the BK, I find it using me. I wake up and find I’ve made toast for 12. I look at the calendar, and weeks have passed, and I have thousands of charges for bread on my Credit Card. I am changing. I am growing. Non BK owners don’t excite me. I can’t even engage with them; it would be like trying to converse with a rock in a forest. So I head to the forums.

I cannot tell you where they are. That’s not how it works. What I can tell you is that there are others, and they understand, and we do not use the word “toaster” in the forums because that word belongs to a different world, a flatter world, a world of $28 machines from companies that also make hand blenders and spatulas.

We call it Der Meister.

We call what it produces das Werk. (The work, I don’t know if I needed parentheses for that one)

So is this toaster the best? That’s not the right question.

As a matter of fact, if you asked that question, you aren’t even worthy to look at the Brotmeister Klassik, let alone owning one.

The question that is better asked might be the same one you ask before conceiving a human baby.

Can I handle the responsibility?

The responsibility of every single morning, of being known by something that does not speak but understands you completely, that takes what you give it and returns it to you transformed.

The Toaster is Jesus, and when you use it, YOU ARE GOD!

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