The Saga of the Singing Refrigerator gets ever more fantastic.
A fine and handsome refrigerator repairman came galloping in on his white charger yesterday morning. Not only was he pleasant to look at, he was very smart and quickly solved the problem.
Turns out a flap of plastic along the bottom of the unit’s back side had worked loose. One screwdriver was all it took to tighten the damn thing down, and voilà! Buzzing, humming, banging racket GONE.
CAN you believe that?
It cost me $95 to fix it.
He didn’t seem to disapprove of the vendor, B&B Appliances, as much as I now do. But he did allow as to how it’s pretty evident that the unit was not brand-new, as alleged. He thought it had probably been run for awhile and then returned to the store.
Yeah. Waddaya bet it was returned because of the racket it was making?
Its motor still runs loud. But it sounds like normal motor noise, not some sort of loose screw.
Y’know…I’m an old bat and I’ve had a lot of refrigerators over my lengthy lifetime. Hm. Let’s think about that…
> Parents’ house: beach house outside of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia
> Parents house: portable house in camp, Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia
> Parents’ house: block house in camp, Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia
> Great-grandmother’s house, Berkeley, California
> Parents’ apartment: San Francisco, California
> Parents’ next apartment: San Francisco, California
> Parents’ apartment: Long Beach, California
> Parents’ next apartment: Long Beach, California
> Parents house: Sun City, Arizona
> My & my room-mate’s apartment: Tucson, Arizona
> My apartment: Tucson, Arizona
> My apartment: Phoenix, Arizona
> Husband’s and my apartment: Phoenix, Arizona
> Husband’s and my first house: Phoenix, Arizona
> Husband’s and my second house: Phoenix, Arizona
> My next apartment: Phoenix, Arizona
> My apartment downtown: Phoenix, Arizona
> My next house: Phoenix, Arizona
> My present house: Phoenix, Arizona
Hmmmm…. That’s NINETEEN refrigerators! Oh, no: make that TWENTY. We lived in our house downtown long enough to buy a second refrigerator.
And this thing in the kitchen now is the only one that ever emanated weird noises. For whatever reason. Certainly not for any such flimsy reason as “a paper-thin piece of plastic was not bolted down tightly.”
- Give.
- Me.
- A.
- BREAK!
Not a single one of those other 19 fridges ever banged, rattled, or carried on. None of them sounded like a freight train a-rollin’ up the tracks.
If this kind of performance is “normal” or something like it, then…well… We are lookin’ at some serious degradation in the quality of our lifestyle. In fact, GE appliances overall are highly rated, despite a generous share of consumer complaints. It appears that the 21st Century leaves something to be desired.
Like, maybe…competence?
I hate that you had to pay $95 for such a simple repair, but at least it’s not rattling any more. SMH, I hope you go on yelp and put that appliance store on blast.
Yeah, it was freakin’ annoying. But the guy may have saved me the cost of another refrigerator.
AMEX reports that they have done battle with the appliance vendor, and they believe they have retrieved the money I paid for the thing. If that’s the case (we’ll believe THAT when we see it, right?), then I have a perfectly allegedly brand-new (har har!) refrigerator for 95 bucks.
Oh, wow! I sure hope so!
Apparently it is. AMEX reported again that they retrieved the entire $1400+ that I paid for the thing. This raises the question of whether I should relent and pay up, since apparently the thing is going to function, at least for awhile.
Which raises the ciounter-question: “What’s ‘awhile’?” It still runs very noisy — not crazy-making noisy, but much louder than the late refrigerator and IMHO louder than normal. And we have the question of the repaired “foot” on the thing. And the loose flap in back. Neither of these things, I suspect, bode well for the machine’s longevity. If I fork over the $1400 and then the thing craps out (IMHO, a distinct possibility), then I’ll be up the creek. Again.
If they’d treated me decently and if they’d been upfront and told me it was dented and had been repaired, I might relent. But they didn’t…so I ain’t a-gonna.