You turn it on — it doesn’t work.

Assembled the oven. Now it has to be tested and repaired where it has broken — got ready, in short, to be resold second-hand. This oven really is somebody’s affordable ticket into business. It is already worn out and the main customer has used it for all it was worth, but essentially it is a lump of iron with nothing much in it to break. And if something does break, it can be fixed by hand. You can bake practically anything in it. Well, apart from sponge cakes and certain kinds of bread. You can bake pizza, meat, baguettes, roasts — everything, basically. And it runs continuously: the job is simply to put the raw dish onto the conveyor at one end and take the finished one off at the other. You can also slide something into the little window inside the conveyor. You can adjust the temperature and the speed at which the food travels (from 30 seconds to half an hour in the oven).

I turn it on — the upper floor is working. The lower one isn’t. The conveyor on the upper floor is still jerking. Okay. I stop it, take apart the conveyor drive, find a broken part, look for a new one in the warehouse, replace it — the conveyor runs smoothly. A few more small adjustments here and there. Tighten something up, fix something else. The heater is working fine.

The lower part is silent as a partisan. I’m taking it apart, looking for the problem. I find it. The limit switch that protects against an idiot opening the cover, under which there’s a fan with blades, a belt drive, and 220 volts, is broken. The irony is that I opened this cover myself and am searching for the problem. If there hadn’t been a switch, no one would have opened the cover. I replaced the switch — everything works. Gas automation, temperature control, cooling after shutdown.

Someone will build their life on this stove. And in the evening, they will quietly curse that it has non-metric threads instead of metric ones.