The Condo of course needed all new kitchen appliances, after we got rid of the original 1978 harvest gold ones. I indulged myself with Whirlpool stainless steel ones, including a double door counter-depth fridge with the door ice and water dispenser and everything.
The fridge was delivered 3 weeks ago and has been nicely freezing everything in the freezer compartment. It has also been freezing everything in the refrigerator compartment too. I followed the owner’s manual directions about setting the refrigerator compartment temperature and waiting 24 hours for the actual temp to change. But it didn’t work.
This is an electronic control panel and in my uneducated consumer role I supposed that the panel will need to be replaced because it’s malfunctioning. And then last weekend the water dispenser stopped working; I figured it’s frozen up somewhere.
So I called for service; I picked Thursday (yesterday) as the service day. I hoped they would give me a two-hour window for the service appointment so I’d lose less time from work. Oh, no. They would call me between 8 and 9 am on Thursday to tell me the two-hour window for the service appointment. Crud.
OK, OK, so Thursday morning I sat at home by the phone till 9:15, no call, and then called the service company. Who told me that a service tech will arrive between noon and 5 pm.
Holy camoley! Two hour window?
About 2 o’clock the tech arrives, a very nice and knowledgeable guy named Eddie. Two minutes of questioning and looking at things and he says, that control board will need to be replaced, I’ll write up the order for it. And, he sez, there’s a tank for the water dispenser behind the fridge compartment and that’s frozen up now which is why the water isn’t flowing.
Hey, I should go into fridge repair as my next career.
Eddie suggests that I unplug the fridge and leave the fridge compartment door open for about an hour, then plug it in again and restart it; sometimes those electronic control board thingies just need to be reset and then work fine. We do that; he leaves. An hour later I plug in the fridge, start it up and close the door. By bedtime it’s back to the same old frozen fridge compartment.
I HAVE HAD TO BURN A WHOLE DAY OF VACATION LEAVE OVER THIS. AND I WILL PROBABLY HAVE TO TAKE ANOTHER WHOLE DAY OF VACATION LEAVE FOR THEM TO REALLY FIX THE DAMN THING.
I don’t want to think how much this is really costing me – at least one and probably two full days’ pay, to be precise. Not immediately out of pocket, but earned leave time burned up over a malfunctioning fridge. It would be cheaper to just buy a little fridge for the stuff I don’t want to freeze and use the big one as a mega-freezer. But that would be eccentric – lord knows women of certain age have to be careful not to act eccentric – and anyway I don’t have that much extra room around here.
Bah.
Wow, Suz! Sorry that you had to use up your vacation time for this. Why is it that the repair people always tell you a time range that they never ever honor?
Good luck with the repair; I hope you won’t need to take more time off and that the fridge only needed a few days to adjust to its new home…
It’s their dispatch system, how they deploy their service people to make all the calls. Personally I think they could do better but I suppose they don’t give a rat’s rear what I think.
Sadly, the fridge has had three weeks to adjust to its new home and this is as good as it’s going to get without replacing that control board.
In the meantime, with the fridge pretty much freezing everything that goes in it, I have a GREAT excuse to dine out all the time. Definitely a silver lining to this little cloud.