Friday, Nov 15

• 9-ish AM, Get drink from the fridge, all is well.
• 11-ish AM, Fridge is dead. No lights anywhere, no sounds. Everything else in the house is working. Think maybe it’s the breaker – no obvious breakers tripped. The “legend” for my breakers is an absolute mess and I can’t really read them, but think I figure out which ones are for the kitchen, reset all of them. No joy.
• I had bought a 5 year warranty with this fridge. Checked and it expired 9/4/2024. So, about 9 weeks ago?
• Move everything I can to my mini fridge downstairs. Actually holds quite a bit of it. In the end I only lost a couple of ice cream sandwiches and a bag of Tru Fru Frozen Dark Chocolate covered Raspberries. (No freezer section in mini-fridge.)
• Remember the fridge has a changeable water filter that always has some water in it – pull it and throw it away.
• Afternoon research fridge brands and decide to go with Whirlpool. I want as basic as possible, fortunately lots of sales going on.
• Find fridge I want at RC Willey, trying to place order online but don’t see an option for them to haul away the old one.
• Call in and talk to rep, says he can either place the order for me, or can add it once I’ve completed order. I ask him to place order for me, however there’s no more in stock, the last one is currently “on hold” as part of my online shopping cart.
• I try to complete the order, says my account is locked because he’s in it. He gets out, and I try to pay with PayPal. However, I’ve never placed such a big order through PayPal before and my credit card company flags it as fraud.
• Try to enter the credit card in directly, rejected again.
• Try a different card, success! Give him the order number and he says he’ll add the “haul away old fridge” item to it.
• Get my confirmation email and notice that in all the weirdness of my going back again and again trying to get this order to go through, somehow it lost the option of having them do the install for me!
• Call back into the store, get the sales guy I had been talking to. He had also just noticed that it said “customer self install” on the invoice and was going to call me. Confirmed I definitely wanted them to do it and he said my credit card should still be in the system and he’d get that added for me.
• Get a call about 20 minutes later. The system did not retain my cc number, so had to provide again.
• DONE!!! Should be delivered Monday!

Saturday, Nov 16

• 9 AM – Find LARGE puddle of water in front of fridge. While I had remember to pull the filter, I completely forgot about the ice inside! (I never use the ice dispenser.)
• Clean up the mess. Place order for groceries with no new fridge or freezer items.
• Getting ready to pick up grocery order and notice Amazon Echo not playing in kitchen. It happens, unplug it and plug it in again. Doesn’t start up. Try turning on my candle warmer that’s on the same outlet, nothing.
• Pull the fridge out (thank heavens for rollers on these things and ceramic tile floors!). Unplug it and plug my little candle warmer in – nothing!
• Head back down to breakers, still don’t see anything has tripped. Slowly flip every single one to the off position, wait 1 full minute, slowly flip them all back on. (Lots of things in this world can be fixed by shutting them down completely!)
• Try candle warmer again in fridge outlet – NOTHING! Try on a couple of different kitchen walls – still nothing!
• Grab a little bedside lamp and try that – WORKS!
• Plug fridge in – WORKS!
• Put fridge back and leave to get my groceries. After about an hour the temperature reading on the fridge is down to 55 from 71.
• Call RC Willey to cancel order. It’s currently “locked” because it’s in the manifest stage where they are prepping to deliver Monday. She gets the cancellation into the system and will call back on Monday when everything is completely canceled.

So, what happened? With all the construction around me I have been having “brown outs” with my electricity. One was bad enough I had to reset clocks on microwaves and stuff. Or did my candle warmer trip the breaker when it died? Who knows? But it’s been 24 hours since this mess started and I’m no longer out of pocket for about 2k. I just need to make sure all the cancellations go through and no charges appear anywhere.

Time for a nap, then I’ll move stuff back into the main fridge and spend the rest of the day chilling with Stardew Valley or something. 😩

Hugs!