Day Two: The Freeze Out

It's Wednesday morning. The folks yanking out the cabinets and appliances and hauling all the old crap to the dump are due at 8 and show at around 9. It's the same guy from yesterday, but he brought the one who called in sick. A little later, two non-English speakers show up to scrape and patch the wall's many bad spots. The company's owner also shows up briefly.

I'm working from home because I'm expecting Heavenly Cool to come fix my fridge nightmare. At some point around 10, we turn the power off to pull out the dishwasher. Just to make sure I didn't miss a call from the fridge repair folks, I call them.

Surprise! They've never heard of me. I'm not on the schedule, and the don't do Baltimore addresses on Wednesdays. Even if they could, they've got no time to see me. So I call Lowe's. The woman tells me that Heavenly Cool accepted the appointment, but that's not the word when she calls them. What do I want to do? Well, I want her to get me another appointment. I stayed home to wait for the tech, so they owe me a tech. "I'm sorry," she says, "but we don't do same-day service."

That's when I yell. "Same-day service? This is the NEXT day! I am waiting for the service today that you promised me yesterday!" I tell that I'm calling Landers, and I expect Lowe's to pay for it. I get the spiel about the repair place needing to be a "certified" Whirlpool repair company and ask for a list of those, but she has no such list. So I call Landers, who is at my house in 20 minutes.

The tech is Danny. He's your best construction guy fantasy—tall, handsome, confident, and competent. He pulls the fridge out of the spot where it's been since May of 2014, when Video Tech Center came to fix it. Which is exactly what didn't happen. I gather from the look on his face that something's wrong, and he shows me. "See this hose? It's not hooked up. It's supposed to be connected to the freezer, but it's just lying there! And the pan? The technician put a big hole in it." He takes my phone to get good pictures of everything.

So what does that mean? It means that twice a day, every day, for the last two and a half years, the freezer has been defrosting into the floor.

Meanwhile, the tile guy is lifting up the old floor to reveal a big hole. In a few months, that refrigerator would've been in the basement.

I decide it might be best to let the warranty repair company do the work, so I call them to ask them to bring the two parts; Danny from Landers gives me the parts numbers. Heavenly Cool tells me that the techs don't bring any parts for warranty work, and they have to be the ones to diagnose the issue. So the guy will come out, look at it, go back to the office and make sure the repair is covered by the warranty, order the part, and come back out to fix it. Danny's jaw drops. He orders the part and will be back Friday to fix it.

Meanwhile, my work day is wrecked. I can't concentrate, so I put in to take the rest of the day off. By 2:30, the paint scraping guys have gone, though they aren't done, and the demo guys have scraped the last of the tile and are about to leave. Rick has saved me one bead from the original wall. It has little scary faces on it. I'm making one of those scary faces.

It's 3:00, and I am alone and seething over the refrigerator. I've made a dozen calls to Lowe's customer care, service, and corporate, and I have reimbursement forms to fill out. I cry for a few seconds, and then I design this masthead.