The microwave is dead. Or it’s “Mostly Dead” as Miracle Max might say.

My cold coffee used to take a minute to make nice and toasty. Now it takes three minutes to make it lukewarm. At this point I suspect blowing on it with my hot, steamy breath might heat it up faster.

Not that two extra minutes is some large inconvenience in the grand scheme of things unless of course the ticking bomb is going to go off in 45 seconds and your trying to MacGyver it with some melted bubblegum that is taking too long to heat, in which case you have now just MacGrubered it.

It’s kind of about expectations. I’ve come to expect the coffee to be hot after one minute. But it’s really about the way I react when expectations aren’t met. Am I negative about it? Probably. Not like I’m melting down but more like experiencing annoyance. I suppose that for more serious lapses in expectations a meltdown might occur. How do you react?

Maybe that letdown is unavoidable. I mean we’re not stupid. We know the expectation has not been met. We set it. And I don’t mean like situations where you have set really high, unrealistic expectations. But just expectations based on past performance.

The microwave has heated the coffee in a minute a thousand times and I can reasonable expect it will do so again. In fact this understanding of expectations alerts us to when something is wrong. It’s a good and useful thing. Such as setting expectations for children and workers and society. I suspect we need some of that.

How often though do we place expectations unnecessarily? On things and people? Why have we become so demanding of actions outside of ourselves? Is it that ever present need to control? I can set expectation to control your behavior. So I think so.

It’s everywhere. Look at how often we place expectations on things we don’t remotely understand well enough to do so. Or that it’s none of our business to do so? And it’s even more worrisome because we place these expectations universally with no understanding of context.

And yet we are repeatedly and constantly annoyed with unmet expectations. With each failure comes annoyance or worse. And with each of those you introduce unnecessary negativity into your life, over and over again. And you don’t even know it.

Is it time to remove the clutter of too many expectations from your life?