Not Quite What I Expected When I Bought a New Fridge

Maybe not the tastiest advertisement?

So, a month or so ago, we got a new refrigerator. Our old, ugly, inefficient, eighties-"almond"-colored one (with wood veneer handles!) had a crappy, non-sealing seal that kept it from closing properly, and after too many nights being left open partway and too many green onions left languishing by my thrifty husband, the thing stank so bad that opening it literally made me puke.
Granted, I’m pregnant (have I mentioned that here?), but the smell was intolerable, even to a normal person. (Or so I’d guess, since my thrifty husband pled the Fifth on the whole thing and I never invited anyone else to smell it.) It was old and ugly and the little metal bars in the door designed to hold in all your condiments were loose and kept falling off (how many fish-sauce spills does it take to inspire a person to buy a new fridge?) and due to be replaced by the end of the year—the puking just sped the process up a bit.

So I found a new one that fit into the tiny space allotted by whatever sadist created our current plenty-large-but-not-thoughtfully-designed-and-therefore-lots-of-tripping-over-the-baby-and-her-toys-while-cooking, drives-me-crazy kitchen arrangement, and within the week it was ours.

It’s a thing of stainless steel, (mostly) unscented beauty.

Pulling the milk containers from the chest-height top shelf of the door (instead of the shin-level bottom shelf of the body of the old one) makes me happy every time.

Except that bad freezer burn has been forming already. And the freezer door flies open when you close the fridge door. And the handles do not line up entirely properly. And some cream went bad really quickly (which was possibly not the fault of the fridge but the fact that it was kept around longer than usual as my husband is now the only one in the family drinking the stuff since the baby-in-the-making has made coffee a very unpleasant experience for me).

We ordered the fridge from a small, locally owned company instead of the thriftier internet for this exact reason—if something went wrong, I wanted to call an actual person who could come out and take an actual look at the thing and be all nice and friendly and locally-owned about it. That’s just how you do shit when you’re from Iowa.

So a fridge guy came out and worked on things for a while. A long while. Like half an hour. And while he was in there he kept talking to himself, like talking himself through something. I was trying to get work done in the other room so wasn’t paying much attention and assumed he was talking to a supervisor on his cell phone—except that he wasn’t.

After much muttering, he called me in to offer this: the fridge was, in his opinion, tilted back a little too far, so he fixed that. Also, the seal on the fridge is “too compressed” which is why the handles don’t line up and we should not store ANYTHING HEAVY in the doors, so he moved the MILK CONTAINERS to the SHIN-LEVEL BOTTOM SHELF of the body. Also we should try turning down the freezer and seeing if that takes care of the freezer burn.

In short, nothing that couldn’t have been conveyed in 30 seconds over the phone probably. But, whatever, it was nice to have an actual person assess things—no matter how slow or muttery he was.

But it was not a satisfying solution. For $700, you bet your ass I’m going to STORE THE MILK CONTAINERS ON THE TOP SHELF OF THE DOOR. Or else! You really want to stand between a pregnant lady and her delicious, ice-cold milk? Really?