Not on my wish list

Last night I baked a couple of potatoes for supper. It's the one thing I wish I had a microwave for: pop'em in a paper bag and your spuds are ready in minutes. Done to perfection.
Otherwise, a microwave is not a gadget I've got a lot of time for, probably because I wouldn't know how to use it. I have a friend in Como (Hi, Fiorella!) who cooks all her vedgies in it, and out comes a cornucopia of aubergenes, courgettes, peppers, carrots and artichokes, all delicious. But no potatoes. So it was with some pride that I shared my tiny secret about spud-baking with her...
Actually, I've probably picked up my prejudice against microwaves from my Mum. Back when she first got hers in the mid-seventies, I can remember there was talk of revolutionising the bar she ran, with an unending suppy of easily produced bar snacks. Yet a few weeks later and the only thing that saved the microwave from relegation to the back of a cupboard was its handiness as an instrument for softening butter. Once spreadable butter was introduced, back in the early eighties, the microwave got a new lease of life as a plate-warmer, but in my mother's eyes, I suppose it never really escaped the taint of those stories about Soviet submariners cooking their intestines when they forgot to close the oven door, or the dangers a microwave poses to poodles...
Do you know that story? It's no doubt apocryphal, an urban legend, and goes something like this:
There was a lady in Florida who had the habit, on the rare chilly mornings that Florida is prone to, of switching on her oven, at the very minimum, before she took Fifi out for his morning stroll, then popping her pet in the oven on her return for a couple of minutes to warm him up. When this over-protective pet-owner acquired a microwave, she reckoned that a 20 second blast would be quite enough to achieve the same effect, without, however, realising that a microwave cooks in a very different way from a traditional oven, beginning on the inside and cooking outwards. Needless to say, the poodle came out with cooked kidneys and never went walkies again.
And of course, as this tale is a parable of American excess, it ends with the pet-owner suing the company who made the microwave and winning an absurdly extravagent sum in damages on the grounds that nowhere in the instructions did it say that it was unsuitable for pets.
Nor, no doubt, did it say how well it bakes potatoes. Remember, you first read that right here!