Remove burrito from packaging. Preheat air fryer to 330. Microwave on high for one minute. Place burrito seam side up in the air fryer and cook for 15 minutes.
I wrote that. Voluntarily. On a Sunday afternoon, in my notes app, with the calm procedural confidence of NASA documenting a lunar descent. It concerns a $3.49 frozen breakfast burrito from Costco.
Directly underneath it, in the same note, there’s a second entry:
For Mom: wrap burrito, place on a plate with a lid. Microwave for 70 seconds on each side.
Same burrito. Different launch procedures. I’ll explain the difference, but first I’ll have to explain the Costco.
It was Sunday and it was hot as balls. My mother is 88, and our standing activity is a walk in the park — but the Bay Area had decided to do its annual impression of Phoenix, so we skipped the park and drove to the Newark Costco instead.
Recreationally.
I’d like to state for the record that recreational Costco is a legitimate activity and nobody should have to defend it. It has walking paths. It has seating.
It has Chinese people, so Mom doesn’t feel threatened, and then more Indian people than Chinese people, so she can feel right back to threatened again.
It has industrial air conditioning and a sample line for tandoori chicken naan mini-sandwiches — a line so long and so focused that standing in it starts to feel like Christmas working in somebody’s Pan-Asian pantry kitchen.
We waited. Obviously.
What does an 88-year-old woman and her middle-aged son talk about while doing laps around a warehouse, when her dreams of having grandchildren have been shattered decades before, but are both too exhausted to deal with the aftermath?
Fruit logistics.
She buys fruit in quantities that assume she’s provisioning a summer camp, so the real negotiation is how to split it — what goes home with me, what stays with her. We spent a while on dishwasher rinse aid, how it makes no logical sense to either of us. It sits right next to the dishwashing detergent, a whole second product, and my dishes come out of the dishwasher visibly fine without it. Mom agrees, as if she’s operated a dishwasher more than twice in her lifetime. We stood there in the aisle, two generations, fully united against a product category.
I can’t tell you how nice it is to agree with your mother this completely about anything.
We split a box of frozen breakfast burritos.
That’s how the technical writing started.
This frozen burrito, it turns out, ships with multiple official preparation methods. There’s a microwave-only version. There’s an air fryer version. There’s even a hybrid version — microwave for only 30 seconds this time, then transfer to the air fryer to finish — like the burrito is being handed off between departments.
I honestly don’t know what the fuck all this effort is for. Crispiness, I assume? Somewhere a burrito engineer determined that seam-side-up placement matters, and you know what? I believe them. I followed it. 330 degrees, fifteen minutes, seam side up, per the documentation.
That’s my version.
Mom does not have an air fryer. Told Mom about the virtues of air fryers and she was all, “I reject your narrative.” (I think that’s what the English translation was. The takeaway is that I know better than to buy her one.) Mom has a toaster oven from 1974 — an appliance that is older than I am, and holding up better — and she is perfectly happy with it.
She also has a microwave I bought her off Amazon, one of those Amazon Basics models, the kind where the door locks and you have to press the number 0 just to open it. I know about the 0 because I nearly wrecked the door the first time I used it, pulling on a handle that was never going to give. There’s a note next to that microwave now, explaining the 0. I told myself I wrote it for her.
So her burrito instructions got translated for her actual kitchen: no air fryer, no preheating, no interdepartmental handoffs. Wrap it. Put it on a plate. Put a lid on the plate. Seventy seconds on each side. Done. The gentler protocol — written for her microwave, and her hands, and her patience, which at 88 are all different instruments than they used to be, and all still hers.
Welcome to caregiving. In the movies, it’s hospital hallways and conversations where someone is crying in a parking lot, and yes — some of it is, actually. But the day-to-day of it — even for a drama queen such as myself — is, honestly, the monotony. The documentation. You’re writing the world down at exactly the level of precision the person you care for needs to operate it. Which door needs the 0. Which recipe skips the appliance she doesn’t own.
Which version has the fewest steps between her and a hot breakfast.
I’ve spent years around other developers. Developers wrote specs. I didn’t expect the spec-writing to follow me into mom’s kitchen, but here we are. My recipe is optimized for the burrito. Hers is optimized for our sanity.
Dad’s birthday is coming up. Mom stopped caring about birthdays for a while now. It’s his first birthday since he died; it is what it is. We don’t have a plan yet. It’ll probably be too hot for the park.
There’s always the Costco.
And in her freezer, her half of the box, waiting:
Wrap it. Put it on a plate. Put the lid on. Seventy seconds on each side.