I had a great tale to tell you about today. It was going to be so exciting and wonderful. It would have left you smiling all day, that’s how good this story is. The stuff of dreams and laughter and happy children with puppy dogs. Just joyous stuff.
Instead I’ll tell you about the refrigerator.
Yesterday we broke it.
To be more precise it broke on us. Yay. Something else broke. Finally, however, something broke on its own. That’s a first. It was the same old story though, boy meets girl, girl goes into kitchen. Girl wonders why her feet are wet. Girl discovers the water is coming from the freezer. Girl mutters under her breath. Boy walks in and discovers what the girl’s already discovered.
Everything is melting. The good news is that at the end of the month there is precious little in our fridge and freezer. A few drinks, a door full of condiments, a couple of cheeses and pasta. In the freezer there was chicken, pork and a few containers of ice cream.
And ice. Lots of ice. Though we found it on the floor in its more playful physical form.
To Google. And then to the Whirlpool site. And to the phone, where the helpful voice helpfully points out that the helpful help line isn’t exactly helpful on Sundays. Everything breaks on Sundays.
If that’s not the name of an emo album within the next year I’ll be disappointed.
I discovered the downside to cultivating so many friends who prefer sarcastic humor. I asked for advice on Facebook and Twitter and none of you were any help. Punchlines, sure. Advice, nothing. (You should all be ashamed!)
Because learning is sometimes retroactive, I learned that there isn’t much you can do for a refrigerator as a consumer. We consulted manuals, both hard copy and digital. We surfed the forums. The refrigerator is only eight years old. It worked Friday night. It is plugged in and still humming. The lights work, no breakers have been tripped. None of this made sense.
We called the nice, patient and thoroughly sensible home warranty people. They find a local company. They are, as one might reasonably expect, closed on Sundays. They like emo music.
So, the warranty people tell us …
Hey, that’s the name of the band. “Check out the new album from The Warranty People: Everything breaks on Sundays!”
The warranty people tell us the repair man would be out tomorrow, which is today. The company’s name is a set of initials. Their voicemail is a chipper young woman who’s just proud, proud, proud to be recording this outgoing message. I liked my chances.
The repairman, our new best friend, came out today. His name is Rambo. He looks like what might have happened if John Rambo had, instead of being a West Coast drifter, turned into an HVAC, refrigerator guy who preferred a gray jumpsuit.
He walked right in and identified the kitchen area, tipped off no doubt by the counters and various kitchen accoutrement and paraphernalia. We really should disguise the room a bit more. Also the ice coolers stacked with our hopefully still chilled foodstuffs are a good hint.
We’d moved the surrounding clutter. I’ve already inspected the back of the refrigerator, which is much like my inspection under the hood of a modern car. Everything is … there. Few pieces sneak out under cover of darkness. (I lock up, and the parts lack the height and opposing thumbs required to negotiate the door.)
Rambo pulled off that little piece of cardboard at the bottom of the refrigerator. Yours probably has one too. It is dusty in there. And I hope yours is as well, otherwise this is just embarrassing. He looked and he poked and he turned on his flashlight. He removed a piece. He shook it. It rattled.
“That’s definitely your problem,” he declares.
Turns out this is the starting whatsits on the compressor and it has burned up, hence the rattle, which is apparently the part that is broken. It is a common piece, he said, and he looked to see if there is one in his truck.
There is not.
He must order the part. Hopefully, he says, it will be here this week.
Now look, Stallone, I understand you can’t control FedEx. I appreciate that you’re only covering your bases. But don’t you think it would be a little odd that a common piece can’t be identified, located, put on a truck and shipped here before the week is out?
Can I just go down to the local hardware shop, show them this thing — taking care to rattle it, so they know it is broken — and ask them for a replacement part?
I paid Rambo, who is a very nice guy. He said he’ll make sure the part gets ordered today, which is good, because I have three coolers of food and ice sitting on the floor. He promised to come back as soon as the part is in to make everything nice and frosty.
We bought dry ice at the local dry ice distribution center. (They also offer groceries, it turns out.) And I learned why you don’t touch dry ice. You can get an exposure burn in just a few seconds. Fortunately everything is cooling, because I have solid carbon dioxide in my kitchen.
Of course we had an extra refrigerator before we moved. We just had to sell it. For some reason it was agreed that an extra set of every appliance was being just a bit too overcautious. We regret that decision today. We let the old one go cheap too, according to my hasty and desperate searching this weekend. But we let it go to a couple who were in a similar situation. Hopefully the karma will be repaid in the form of a quick repair.
We ate freshly thawed chicken tonight. No one is ill or dead. (The long awaited second album from The Warranty People … )
So let’s keep count: air conditioner (in August, which has to be worth two points), the shower and the refrigerator.
To cheer us up, the best part of the Internet today is here:
This is a news website article about a scientific paper
In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.
If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.
The entire piece is worth your time. I can only assume that the author had a few minutes before his deadline, but none of the things in the press release folder or quick searches on Google inspired him. We are the better for it.
Monday history: First, check out this video from 1970. Unfortunately I can not embed it, because the site is from 1972.
That road, quiet and peaceful and uninteresting as the clip is, is now a big road in Birmingham. It was quiet in that shot in large part because the corridor was brand new. Construction started in 1962 with the first blast through the mountain. The cut was completed in 1967, the highway opened in 1970.
In part this corridor helped boost development in the southern suburbs. Homewood, Vestavia and Mountain Brook and even Hoover were there (though Hoover was brand new), but they hadn’t yet realized their full potential.
Driving through the mountain you can see about 150 million years of history, including a vein of the red ore that was so vital in the city’s early prosperity. The roadwork yielded a new species of trilobite. Not a computer measurement, Acaste birminghamensis was an ancient marine anthropod. The area, because of the geology lesson it provides, is one of seven Alabama National Natural Landmarks.
So that was then, 1970. This is now:
Note the changes. Note the similarities. Should have driven it during rush hour instead of mid-morning.
That’s enough for one day. if you have a little plastic cube (that doesn’t rattle) which can be somehow magically plugged into my refrigerator, please leave a comment.
