It IS easy to burn your fingers. In addition it is a very poor toaster because the timer control (how you set the darkness of the toast) has such a wide range (to 30 mins) that the difference between untoasted and burnt is only a few degrees. The dials are very hard to read. Also the timer sometimes gets stuck on if you don't go to > 5mins then back . In the few months I had it, I had to throw away a lot of burnt toast and after the flaming toast incident, I ended up replacing it.