• a microwave that I've had for 6 or 7 years;
• a set of plates and mugs that I've had for longer;
• the statistical impossibility that all of these plates and mugs have not gone through this microwave many, many times.

Ok so how is it that sometimes, I'll nuke one of these vessels for the usual amount of time (say, 1:30 for tea, 5:00 for frozen food) and sometimes, the food/liquid will come out the temperature to which I've become accustomed... but the plate or mug will feel like it's been in a kiln for an hour. Like, it's so much hotter than normal that I've lost skin.

I wasn't able to determine if it was just one plate that behaved this way, since they all look alike, and it happened infrequently. But yesterday it happened to a mug for the first time. So today, I nuked it again (same contents: tap water) and it did the same thing. So my theory now is that somehow, the material these things are made of have gone though some kind of state change, and are trying to kill me.

Other theories include:

• Plates have been abducted by aliens and replaced with super-soldier alien hybrid plates;
• Experimental nanobots have escaped and rewritten the plate DNA to turn them into superconductors;
• Neighbors' time-travel experiments have gone awry, causing some of my plates to be travelling forward more slowly, thus, the plate spends more time in the nuker than the food.

Discuss.