Please forgive the humor, but this immediately made a Jerry Lee Lewis song play in my head.

Surely, since we are talking about excited water molecules, you mean "Whole lotta shakin' goin' on"...

I'm sure that OP meant "Great Balls of Fire"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IjgZGhHrYY

Yes, the person you are responding to was making a joke by playing off the fact that we all would have immediately thought of Great Balls of Fire, and then they subverted that expectation. Ergo, humor.

Leave it to Gene Parmesan to school me. Can't believe I missed that. :)

An electrician working at a Radar station here in Iceland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofn_Air_Station) was stuck there overnight during a snow storm. For some reason he decided to stay in the radar room, probably since it "felt warmer". He was found properly cooked the next day. Not really an interesting story, but since I was probably 6 years old when I heard it it's stuck with me ever since and caused an everlasting fear of high powered radar.

This actually sounds a lot like an urban legend. Especially given that it’s a story you heard in your youth.

I wasn’t able to find a report of that happening at the Hofn station, but the same story of this happening to an anonymous microwave technician does appear in other locales.

Snopes did a debunking on these and they say it’s false: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nuke-of-earl/

Yep... considering the skin effect, any microwave radiation would start heating the outside skin layer first, and it would hurt long before anything inside you was "cooked".

If you got locked in there.. then sure... maybe.... but staying in there and not feeling it (or just feeling "warmer", until you die...) nope.

Here's a credible source for some "far short of death", but real incidents: https://academic.oup.com/occmed/article-pdf/50/1/49/4284302/...

Note: They are ~900Mhz, so short of "microwave", but pretty close.

Yeah, most probably an urban legend. But sure stuck in my young mind :).

Ha, stories similar to that were going around in the 90's in the RAF. Particularly if you found yourself out in the cold at an RRH up north somewhere...