GenePool Humor

This past April, we made an important family decision to replace our refrigerator. The one we'd been using had come with the apartment, and it was still fully functional in the sense that it did manage to keep things cold. The problem was that it was rather imprecise about exactly which things it kept cold, how long it did that, and what said things might be subjected to whilst in the process of being maintained in a cold state.

One might be reasonably assured, for example, that an object kept in the freezer half would stay cold for however long one wished. But after more than a month there was a decent chance it would also be overtaken by the creeping wall of ice from the back of the unit, captured like a wooly mammoth who'd picked the wrong glacier to doze off next to.

In the refrigerator portion, perishables had to be kept on the middle shelf exactly in the center. Too close to the front and they would rot almost right away. Too close to the back and they would freeze solid. This made celery a problem, as the front of the stalks tended to rot while the back froze, but I resolved this by avoiding recipes that called for celery. Things kept slightly longer in the drawers, except we that only one drawer was functional. The two useless drawers were on the bottom, and whenever one opened them there was a good possibility that the shelf they were beneath would collapse without the drawer to support it. Worse, a wave of cool water-- having drifted south from the glacial system in the freezer-- would cascade out from the very bottom of the refrigerator, impelled forward by the opened drawer.

So it more closely resembled a controlled demonstration of climatic change than an actual refrigerator. But it did keep things cold, provided those things were well-positioned and their drastically shortened shelf-lives were taken into account when planning meals.

Unlike everything else in the apartment, the refrigerator was not owned by our landlord, Joe, so when we went to him and explained that the polar ice cap was melting and drowning the small tribe of grapes we'd foolishly stored in the bottom shelf, he recommended we simply go out and buy a new one ourselves.

Fair enough. Armed with the remnants of our tax return-- the bulk of which ended up going to bills-- we strolled down the street to a store called Sozio's. This was a re-enactment of a trip my wife and children had already taken a month earlier, when they'd wandered into the store just for the heck of it (or so I've been told) and came away thinking "wouldn't it be nice to have a new refrigerator?" This was well before we got the tax return, and it illustrates an important point about how few decisions I actually get to make on my own in my life at present.

Sozio's has a decent selection of what I will call "cool-looking fridges with questionable pedigree." To that end, we chose one by a manufacturer called LG. What I did not know until later was that LG is a major manufacturer of cell phones and other electronics, and is the parent company of Zenith, a major manufacturer of stereo equipment and televisions. You will note, as I did not, that none of the above devices involve keeping things cold as a primary function.

But it's a very attractive refrigerator. Much taller and deeper than our previous unit, it is all-white, and its doors are rounded at the edges, and it's got adjustable shelves in the doors. Best of all, the freezer is in the bottom of the fridge, rather than at the top. I considered this a particularly attractive aspect, as it meant any future glaciation would not end up ruining my broccoli.

The first thing we discovered, within a week of its installation, was that the "super quiet" feature was not in fact "super quiet." It made a hum every few hours that sounded somewhat like a number of very small jets were making emergency landings somewhere behind the unit. The second thing, and this was a much more intractable problem, was that the freezer door did not seal completely when closed. There was a gap. It was at the top left corner of the door, just above the handle. One had to open the refrigerator door (which was above it) and look down in order to even notice. And it was very small, scarcely a quarter of a centimeter.

If there is one thing I have taken away from this experience, it is a newfound respect for air. In the months to come a tremendous amount of water-carrying air molecules would find it's way into this incredibly small space and release water in the form of snow and sleet and, occasionally, hail, partially or completely burying everything we were attempting to keep cold.

For a month or so I assumed the gap would simply go away one morning, all by itself. It seemed that all that was needed was for the rubber in the seal to pop into place, perhaps acted upon by some sort of suction-like phenomenon that had yet to kick in. But then one afternoon Joe decided to replace our oven.

Like the old refrigerator, our gas stove was perhaps one of the first ever built. It worked fine except that the top of it was slightly concave, meaning that whenever I cooked something that required a flat surface-- such as pancakes-- I had to keep rotating the skillet. Also, cooking temperatures needed to be adjusted upwards by 25-50 degrees, as the oven had a tendency to leak whatever heat it didn't feel it needed. Plus, only two of the burners worked, but they were the front two, so that was fine. And it still did what it was supposed to do, i.e., produce a controlled quantity of flame, so I was okay with it. But Joe needed something more, something that would make him comfortable raising our rent.

So Joe was in our kitchen, and the guy installing the new oven was in our kitchen, and Joe did us a favor by showing the guy the freezer door. Since the oven was also bought from Sozio's, he seemed like just the person to ask. He looked at it and said "oh, sure. Just have them call the shop. The gasket needs to be replaced is all. We can fix that."

Emboldened by the notion that someone with a "gasket" could enter my home and resolve the gap problem, I contacted Sozio's. They instructed me to contact their repair company and make an appointment, which I did.

The repair company, it seems, is not directly associated with Sozio's itself. Thinking charitably, one might feel this is an intelligent out-sourcing decision. In practice, though, it frees either party from taking the blame for any problems whatsoever, at any time, ever.

In making the appointment I had to line up a number of Emergency Adults to be available at the proper time, as there was a very good chance that the repair man would arrive when the only people home were my thirteen year old daughter Becky, or my eleven year old son Tim, and this would not do. (Although, when both at home, they add up to one somewhat judgmentally sound twenty-four year old.) So I put my father (who lives four miles away) and Joe (who lives downstairs) on alert, so that if I was called and told they would be arriving within the half-hour, I could mobilize one of them. The crux of the problem was that the repair company could not provide an exact arrival time. Worse, they did not work on weekends. Apparently the bulk of their customers are retirees and shut-ins, as otherwise this system doesn't make very much sense.

The day of the appointment came and went with no phone call announcing their impending arrival. When I called the next morning the woman on the other end of the line seemed surprised that the appointment had not been kept.

"Well does this mean they're going to come today instead?" I asked.

"You'll have to reschedule," she said. "How is a week from Tuesday?"

I expressed, somewhat politely, my belief that it simply could not be possible for them to have a system wherein their repair persons did or did not show up for their appointments as they saw fit, and then the following day pretended they had shown up all along. Surely there was a better explanation, and would she please look into the matter and have someone call me?

Here's my problem. I'm a polite person by nature. I spent many years in the service industry and understand that some things just happen sometimes, and there's no point in yelling about it, and please lower your voice sir. I also knew that more often than not, the person who is polite and rational is more likely to gain satisfaction than the one trying out curse words on the staff.

Naturally, I never got that phone call.

When a week from Tuesday rolled around I did get the phone call, while at work. I immediately called Joe, who is hard of hearing and prone to standing on the front porch for hours staring at traffic, and thus did not hear the ring. Then I tried my dad, who is not hard of hearing. He said he'd drive right over. Then he forgot all about it.

Nonetheless, Tim was there to let the man in. The repair man took the freezer door off, adjusted the hinges, and put it back on. Then he rearranged some of the food. Then he left. He didn't do anything to any "gasket" as evidently he didn't know what that was either. When I got home I discovered a freezer door that opened and closed much more smoothly, and a gap in the top of the door, right where I left it.

The next morning I called the repair people again and got the same woman who was kind enough not to forward my polite request for an explanation regarding the earlier missed appointment. I explained that while it was very nice of the repair man to rearrange all of my food, the real problem was the gradually widening opening in the top of the door and the five inch snow drift that had buried the Ben and Jerry's inside. She made another appointment for a week hence, and then marked down in her appointment book: we've almost got him swearing at us. Don't show up! He may start to cry soon!

The entire matter had become a challenge of my manhood. How could I provide for my family when I couldn't even get a stupid freezer door fixed? My wife asked almost daily what the problem was, and my parents called every few days to determine if I'd closely examined the state's lemon laws to see if they applied. Even Joe was shooting me disappointed looks. Surely, if these were still hunter-gatherer times, I had proven myself to be Most Likely To Get Mauled Comically By A Saber-Toothed Tiger.

But I got the worst of it at my job. I work in a cubicle village with five other men, and despite the high cubicle walls it's very easy to hear every conversation each of us has on the telephone. Thus I am privy to every piece of marital discord, medical issue, and financial worry of everybody around me-- all except for the guy who speaks to his family in an obscure Hindi dialect. He could be burying people in his yard for all I know.

I don't even try to keep secrets from the office. It's to the point now where I just tell everyone what's going on before the phone calls start to come so that they don't have to speculate when hearing fragments. So I told them I was buying a new refrigerator and I told them where I was getting it from. When pressed, I also supplied make and model, because these are a bunch of guys and this is how guys bond. My purchasing choice brought some measure of disapproval, especially from the one guy who works part time at Home Depot.

"We'd have gotten you a better deal," he had said after I'd already bought the new refrigerator, "and from a manufacturer people have heard of." I didn't think much of his comments, as it is well established that all Home Depot employees drank the same Kool-Aid. But it was particularly grating when it turned out he was right.

So with the regular phone calls from my desk to the repair people ("are you SURE they're really coming this time?") I got comments along the lines of "you know, if you'd gotten this from Home Depot we would have replaced the entire thing by now," and "what was the brand name again? Maytaggo?"

And since, technically, I outrank everybody else, the entire matter called into question everything else I did or said. "Why should we listen to him?" they had to wonder, "when he can't even buy a proper refrigerator?"

After the last non-visit from the repairman, I demanded-- politely-- that they'd better just get me a new door, and failing that a new refrigerator. And so a new door was ordered. I had to call three times to find this out, as nobody bothered to contact me with this information, despite their having, on file, my work number, my home number, my cell phone number, the numbers of all the local emergency rooms in case I got into a car accident, the number of my parents, my wife, my children, and all of my friends.

I was told to wait, and they would call me when the door arrived.

A month later, our freezer door was being held closed by a regular application of packing tape, because the ice buildup inside was actively pushing it open. The only use the remaining objects within the freezer could possibly serve was as fetishistic initiators of exotic food poisonings, yet I still felt a proprietary need to keep them in there, just to prove the freezer was not entirely useless. And I'd received no phone call.

Following some increasingly hostile calls from me to both companies, I determined that although Sozio's had in fact placed an order for a new refrigerator door from the manufacturer, the manufacturer had neglected to send it. Or, nobody ordered anything at all. Hard to say. They ordered it again.

Another week passed. The freezer unit was now cooling most of the kitchen. On particularly humid days, it was possible to open the oven door (while it was hot) and create a low pressure front midway between the oven and the freezer, with scattered showers accumulating near the microwave. In an extremely belated effort to try and sound like a responsible company, Sozio's was now offering to provide me with an entirely new unit, to which I responded, "well that depends. Are the people who install the new one the same people that are supposed to do repairs? Because I think we both know I'm never seeing it if that's the case."

And then, a miracle: the new door arrived. Of course the repair company never called me about it, because that would be completely out of character. I had called them one last time to see if they had the door-- if the answer was no I was going to tell Sozio's to order the new unit-- and discovered that yes, it had come in. I made another appointment.

Hoping against hope that they would actually keep the appointment this time, I waited at my home until seven-- the scheduled time was between three and seven-- expecting to get a phone call at any second. Apparently, they had somebody watching my house, because it wasn't until five minutes after I left to run an errand that the phone call came. Tim fielded the call and told the guy to please come to the house anyway, so daddy would stop crying himself to sleep every night. Then Tim called me on my cell phone, I called my father, my father raced over to the house and sat on the porch... and nobody showed.

The next morning, from work, I called the repair line-- "I'm sorry, you'll have to make another appointment"-- and asked to speak to the boss. I then left a scathing answering machine message for him, wherein I described in great detail what I think of Sozio's, the manufacturer, his company, him, and his mother. It was easily the angriest message I had ever left for another human being, and the only reason I was able to do it at all was because I'd spent most of the morning rehearsing it. But after four months of missed appointments, unreturned phone calls, imaginary replacement doors, and the formation of a new polar ice shelf, I had tried every other possibility.

It worked.

This, I grudgingly realized, was why I never got the appointments I'd had scheduled. While I was politely inquiring as to the status of my repairman, everyone else was screaming at the help and getting bumped up the priority list. I'm not sure whether to be happy that this tactic succeeded, or unhappy for the state of civil discourse in general.

Anyway, they were at our house the next day with the new gap-free door, and all is right again.

Now if there were just something we could do about the noise.

© 2004, Gene Doucette

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