We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember Tim S saying
something like:


Back then it was an expensive commodity (same functionality now = 30 quid at
Argos, though I doubt that will last 20 years) and people still (just
about) expected things to last longer than 5 minutes.

Indeedly so. I have an old Zanussi Nothing Fancy 1kW m'wave and it's
around 20 years old. Still works, but it's been retired until I can fix
the door interlock. In the last six years, we've been through three or
four other makes that tend to peg out just after the warranty is up,
with the sole exception being a Sharp that I killed some three years ago
after flooding it with milk.
I plugged the Sharp in a few weeks ago and it worked again, but the
turntable motor seems to have packed it in.