Has this ever happened to you?

Let's talk bells and whistles. My oven has them and I was wondering if they were all they were cracked up to be.

You see, I have in mind what I believe to be the best innovation in oven technology. Hear me out, because this one is brilliant. Tell your friends, especially if they work for companies like General Electric and especially if they want to give me a lot of money for this one.

Ovens have the timers and count-down features. You put your food in and set how long you want it to cook and the machine counts down to that point and they reminds you. Adorable, but highly useless.

I need a "countUP" device. A timer begins as soon as you close the oven door, ticking UPWARDS to keep track of how long it has been since you put the food INTO the oven. Here's the scenario -- you finish assembling the cookies or pizza or whatever and you put the food into the oven and close the door. Immediately, you start cleaning and preparing yourself for fresh hot cookie pizzas or whatever. A few minutes later, you realize that you forgot to set a timer and don't know how long the food has to remain in the oven. You didn't write down when you put it in so you don't know how long to wait to take it out. You try to work backwards by figuring how long it has been since you put the food in (you count commercials, or songs or approximate...all good in theory and horrible in practice). Sure, you can keep opening the door and reducing the temperature, or you can guess and end up with undercooked or overly burnt food.

But if the countUP timer started when you put the food in, you could just look at the display and know when you put the food in. Then you can subtract from the time that, um, you need, um

what was the question again? Damn I'm hungry.