Fiasco averted

Contrary to other countries we do not have many culinary customs for the festive season. Vanillekipferl you´ll get all over the nine federal states during Christmas time, but otherwise there´s not much in common - goose in the East, carp in Vienna, different sorts of sausages plus sauerkraut in the rest of the country. It is different with the first of January, where mostly roasted pork will get served in the households. I wanted to do pork roast, too. The thing is that the rind has to be cross, and our oven won´t do the trick without the help of the grill function at the end of the process. Now I know how to activate it, but hubby evidently does not. So when I was just rolling the dumplings it was time to turn on the grill, which you canot do with fingers so dirty with dough, so I asked husband mine to activate what would make our holiday roast crisp and delicious. If I had not acted in time all we would have gotten for dinner was a small heap of ashes. When I slid the first dumpling into the boiling water I had a quick surveillance of the situation down in the oven and did the only reasonable thing - I yanked the door of the oven open then powered it off. And promptly had a fit, a remarkable one for one so stoic like me. Even daughter showed up from her room because I had been swearing so loud. So what had happened? Left controller on the operating panel is for the setting of the requested function, right controller for the temperature, means that hubby should have activated the grill function on the left, and set the temperature to high on the right. I have to add that hubby does not see well without his reading glasses which had somehow vanished in the depths of our house. So what hubby did was set the left controller up to the last symbol of the scale, a symbol he was not even able to interpret, and the right one up to what he thought was highest temperature - welcome to pyrolysis, the dream of every house-wife who does not love to scrub her oven, but recipe to disaster if you do it with your meal in! If you do not end the setup within one minute (time to consider if you have removed all baking tins) the door will lock for the next three hours, turn the organic content inside the oven to ashes and your tins into a heap of unusable metal. Good if the interior needs a thorough cleaning but bad if your dinner is not yet out, and believe me, we were very hungry at that moment! Well, I realised the mistake in time, so no harm done, but I have to admit I was quite shaken at what might have happened to our pork roast, had I not checked the settings of our oven. It´s not without reason that we say "too many cooks spoil the broth". Or burn the roast, as it would have been in this case! At least we had a good laugh when we finally had dinner, and the roast was really good and crisp!