Refrigerator Saga

March 2006 – We buy a fridge. We are happy. It’s shiny. I give it cheese and sweet tea and I put my Café Du Monde magnet and pictures of the children on the front.

One year later – Fridge makes a horrible noise. It is obviously in some sort of horrific pain. We have the fridge repaired under warranty. Something about the motor? I don’t know, but it runs again and we didn’t have to pay anything. All is well.

July 6, 2009 – The fridge decides not to work. I try to think about what I could have done to cause this defiant behavior, but I think it’s not my fault. It’s 3 years old. I know how 3 year olds act. Maybe that’s it.

Day 1 – I call Samsung. They ask me lots of questions and take all my information. They tell me that a repair person will contact me within 24 hours. I wait.

Day 2 – Nobody calls.

Day 3 – I call Samsung again and explain that I have yet to be contacted by the repairman. Guess what they said? They wanted to know if I had called the repairman myself. I said, “No, I didn’t, because you told me the repairman would contact me.” They said, “Oh no, you need to contact THEM.” I said, “Then WHY did you tell me to wait for 24 hours on a call from somebody that I was supposed to be contacting and then not even bother to tell me who to contact?” They really just mumbled some crap right here but long story short, she gave me a number to call for the local repair company that we were to use. I call. I get a machine. I leave a message. I wait.

Day 4 – Nobody calls me back. So I call again and finally get a person on the phone. I make an appointment for someone to come out that afternoon. Said repairman arrives, takes a look and says “Hey! This motor has no fan!” We are all amazed that it has run 2 years without one. He orders a part and vows to be back tomorrow.

Let me stop here to point out how incredulous the guy was that it had been running for two years without a fan. He was so incredulous, in fact, that at one point I did feel the need to reassure him that I had never, no never, pulled the fridge from the wall and removed the fan for any reason. I wonder if it’s an important enough miracle that we should contact some religious faction, but somehow I sort of doubt it. It did, after all, eventually stop working. The real miracle would be if it was STILL going. But, I digress.

Day 5 – Repair guy replaces motor and fan but apparently is missing a tiny part he needs to complete the job. He leaves the house to get it and actually returns by 5:00 to finish the job. He says he is all done and it should be cold pretty soon. We pay him $200. By the time we go to bed, our fridge is not cold…

Day 6 – Not cold. But it’s Saturday.

Day 7 – Not cold. But it’s Sunday.

Day 8 – Called the guy to come back and try again. He says he’ll order a compressor.

Day 11 – Guy comes to weld in the compressor but runs out of something he needs to finish the job. Vows to return first thing in the morning.

Day 12 – Guy arrives around 2:30 in the afternoon and finishes welding in the compressor. He hangs around in the kitchen for a long, long time before he sheepishly calls for me to come talk to him. He pronounces the refrigerator “condemned”. Condemned to what, I do not know. Hell maybe? A life of hard labor in a work camp? At any rate, he says he will start the paperwork to begin the process of getting a new replacement fridge. We are still under warranty. I wait.

Day 13 through Day 22 - These days are not worth talking about, really. There was a lot of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. There were many bags of ice purchased and many phone calls made. There was lamenting over lack of cheese and cold tea. There was gaining of weight due to take out food and the feeling of camping out in a perfectly good house.

Day 23 – We are actually able to ORDER the new fridge. It is NOT the fridge I wanted because the one I wanted will not fit in my teensy-tiny kitchen. At this point, I truly don’t see renovation as an option. That’s okay. My second choice in black will be fine. Wait….are you saying I can’t have this black one delivered until Day 43? FORTY-THREE? (Aug 17). So, you say I can have the same one in white delivered on Day 27? I’ll take it.

I’ll let you know on Saturday whether we have a fridge and whether I am able to give it sweet tea and cheese and place my Café Du Monde magnet and the pictures of my children on the front. (because I know you care)

What's cooler than bein' cool? ICE COLD

I've been without a refrigerator since Monday morning. I can't begin to count the bags of ice we have purchased since that time. I have now decided that it's TOO MUCH trouble trying to save the contents of the fridge in ice chests and I intend to take it all to my mama. My kids seem to be living over there with their cousins anyway, so their food may as well live there too. The thing I miss most is my tea pitcher. I'm so used to drinking cold tea all day long. I guess I could make a pitcher and stick it down in the ice chest with the cheese and the mayo, but when I pull it out, it'll be all drippy and gross and there'll be a mess to clean up every time I get thirsty. I'd rather whine about not having any tea.


I've been without it before. During hurricane season, we inevitably have to live without a fridge for a bit, but it's very sunny outside right now and it seems so wrong. It's like everything's been put on hold in what I feel is such an unnecessary way. And dealing with Samsung (I KNOW...who knew Samsung made refrigerators?? That was the FIRST mistake I guess) and the repairman has been nigh unto murder provoking. I'm trying VERY hard to talk nice to people, but my patience is wearing thin.

I had a friend tell me to put the fridge under my pillow tonight and the refrigerator fairy would bring me a new one in the morning. I'm very excited about the possibilities of that, but I think it would just be easier to take my pillow to the kitchen and camp out on top of the fridge instead of trying to get the fridge into the bed. I wonder if that would work just as well. Something tells me that it will.

Way too hard

Tonight I got a call from my friend, Coco. She was letting me know that "60 minutes" was on and although it was a rerun, Bon Jovi was the featured subject. She tells me this because she cares. So I go to the den, so unassuming and naive, to turn on the TV to CBS, which should be channel 5 if I remember my days of watching "Survivor" correctly. I turn the TV on and there I find only static. I turn to channel 5 and there is still static. I remember that we are now digital and make sure that crazy box on the top of the TV is showing a green light instead of a red. It is green, but there is still static. My first instinct is to call one of the kids for help, but alas, they aren't home. In fact, they won't be home until Tuesday. Dirty Larry is off running an errand. I gather up all the remote controls that I can find, hoping that one of them will blink something at me that seems familiar or maybe, if they are worth anything at all, they will just start speaking and tell me how the heck to watch Bon Jovi. I start pushing buttons willy-nilly but only have luck in making the static much louder.

Because God is good to me, even when I don't deserve it, Dirty Larry walked in the door right at the moment I was about to commit a crime against an electronic device. He very calmly did some stuff....I don't know what (later he admitted to me that it was what Litkia had taught him to do), but it worked and I was able to bask in the glow of the TV while Jon Bon Jovi was speaking such nice words and looking so pretty.

I hate TV. And, I hate it even worse now that it's digital. What a waste of time and electricity. Don't people know about Netflix and Facebook? Now THOSE are worthwhile time wasters....sheesh.