random thoughts – Day 2,286 (Thursday) – house guest

Credit to the Frigidaire folks for jumping on my refrigeration issue. This morning at 8:20, a call came in from the service department of the appliance store in town to set an appointment for 11:00 to 12:00 for the technician to be here to check out the freezer issue. They are the local service partner to the store in Worcester where I bought my refrigerator. The instructions were to leave everything in the fridge and freezer and keep it running so the tech could check it all out in use. The ice cubes had all melted so I took the trays of water out and I ate a big bowl of semi-frozen blueberries with Greek yogurt, but that was it.

Dining room overlord.

A delivery crew with a loaner fridge was scheduled to arrive between 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. today (arranged yesterday). At 10:10, two guys arrived and by 10:25 they were gone and I was completing an online survey about their delivery. Meanwhile, Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of Frigid Air was lodged in the dining room. For the arrival I had rolled the rug back, moved the buffet down the wall a couple feet, moved Kiki’s personal cabinet a foot or so in the other direction, packed up the sewing machine and moved the dining table closer to the windows, and the couch was moved a few feet for clearance at the entry way. Basically, the dining room is now unusable, but I got a nice workout.

At 11:00, the tech arrived. Pleasantries were exchanged. I learned that the ice cubes, ice cream, and bread are the first casualties in a freezer failure. Once the freezer has lost all coldness, the contents of the refrigerator below are then affected. My collection of Nordic packs from my Misfit Market days (permanent residents of the freezer) likely helped maintain the temperature.

He looked in the fridge and freezer and then we emptied the freezer for further inspection. Almost everything was still in a state of frozenness and I set it into the now quite chilled Darth Vader. The tech checked all the components of my refrigerator, made a phone call, and then told me all the major stuff was fine, using lots of technical terminology from which I heard “compressor blah blah,” “heater blah blah,” and “fan blah blah”. The issue was determined to be the timer gadget thingy (not his words) for the defroster, which had recently become an issue systemwide. The units were getting stuck and not cycling properly. He told me it began about six months ago, and they were replacing as many as 20 of them a week (or day, I was spacing out, whichever, it was a lot of them). He had one of the replacement units in his van and took care of it on the spot. Now, everything is running normally again in my freezer.

As for Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Frigid Air – well, it is my house guest and dining room overlord for the weekend. The service rep from the appliance store checked to see if the truck could come back today to collect it, but they had “a long route” and there wouldn’t be time. Friday is the Juneteenth holiday and the service rep couldn’t promise Saturday morning for pickup and I have an event in the afternoon, so Monday morning it is. I can live with that. Having two functional refrigerators in the house is definitely better than none. Maybe I’ll plug Darth Vader back in and have a massive ice cream feast for the next three days.

If the delivery guys hadn’t been so efficient, or if I had been a later stop than number four for the day, they probably could have been intercepted and wouldn’t have had to unpack and set up the thing at all. If I had called on Monday or Tuesday instead of first not wanting to be an alarmist, and then waiting to get through the stress of prepping for the show Tuesday night, this might have been resolved days ago. 

But, like X2’s dad (Ducky) used to love to say, “If ‘if’ was an ass, we could all go for a ride.” (Stay tuned for more Ducky-isms.) Anyway, everything worked out. Even when my life goes sideways there is often a soft landing, and I'm glad for that.