Originally Posted By: DWallach
1) I was at my parents' place in Florida for a brief vacation over the New Year. I mixed up a big batch of pretzel dough, set the oven, got it all laid out on baking sheets, and then discovered the oven was completely cold. We read the manual cover-to-cover several times, ultimately reaching the conclusion something was deeply wrong with the controller board. I ended up baking the pretzels in the toaster oven.

After a phone call to Miele, the solution was that the oven had somehow gotten itself into "demo mode", which required an undocumented key sequence (put the selector into light mode and hold down both timer buttons for 5 seconds). Afterward, it worked fine.

One of the guys I work with got a fancy new microwave a couple years ago. One day it just quit working and said 'DEMO' on the display. There were no instructions in the manual on how to deactivate it, so he called tech support. They claimed demo mode didn't exist on that model and weren't able to help him. He eventually got ahold of some guy in Texas who is the only person on the planet who knows how to get that model of microwave out of demo mode. I thought that kind of crap only happened in Chevy Chase comedies.