Chances are, your standard morning routine includes flicking your kettle on and making yourself a refreshing cup of tea or coffee. You might assume that the vast majority of people in the first world complete the exact same routine after waking up each day, but it's recently come to light that this is not the case at all.
Thanks to a simple tweet from writer Lucy Valentine, Australians have just discovered that American households don't know what an electric kettle is.
The confusion slowly spread across Twitter:
@LucyXIV I lived there for a few months and went to target to buy an electric kettle. Guy was hella confused. Had to order one off Amazon.
— emma balf meme queen (@balfies) March 8, 2017
And then the question was asked: what exactly do they use to make a cup of tea or instant noodles or jelly? How do they fill a hot water bottle?
No, the answer is stove-top kettles, apparently. The ones that whistle when the water has boiled:
Or, they MICROWAVE their water. (FYI, this is actually somewhat dangerous - it could flashboil and cause serious burns.)
When you read more about this mindblowing phenomenon, there is a very good reason - the US simply does not have the power standards necessary to use electric kettles.
Their power standards dictate that only 120V comes out of the socket, which is about half of what we have here in Australia. So, electric kettles in America would take a really, really long time to boil.
Still, Australian Twitter will not be getting over this in a hurry. Lucy Valentine, however, appears to have moved on - read all about it over on SBS Comedy:
