Ok, so yesterday was about as far from the description of fun as I want to go!
Seriously, yesterday sucked major ass.
I spent large chunks of the day on the telephone or waiting for someone to call me back.
Even when it's someone I
want to talk to, being on the phone is not my idea of fun.
So I am assuming you have read my previous post about my 3 week old NEW Freezer dropping dead for no apparent reason.
That was just the beginning of this stretch of "fun".
Luckily for us, we had kept our previous refrigerator of a couple of years back. Something in that fridge that regulates the temperature in the freezer part of it went "kerflooey"(technical term)and it started staying on until the freezer parts froze up. You would have to turn off the fridge/freezer every now and again, let it thaw out and then turn it back on.
Not a good thing for all the FROZEN food in it, right?
Since at that time, we couldn't get a repair person out here to change the part that was going "kerflooey"(technical term), we had to buy a new fridge, since we could get a new working one asap. We stuck the old fridge in the garage to use for stockpile storage and to some day repair it if the new one died or one of the kids needed a fridge on down the line.
So when the new freezer having died was discovered, we plugged in the old refrigerator out in the garage next to it, and I transferred as much of the contents of the new freezer into the old fridge's freezer compartment. While not everything would fit, I was able to save the more valuable food items.....the meats and cheeses and butter.
Screw the vegetables......
Hey! What would you save? ;-)
So currently, this is what my new freezer looks like.....
What I couldn't squeeze into either of the refrigerators freezer compartments I shoved into the fridge parts. Most of what got put into the fridge parts will need to be cooked and used soon, as it won't keep but for so long.
Because of that, yesterday was also a very bad day for my healthy diet too.
Between the stress of the day and feeling the need to save/use as much of the food as I could, I ate A LOT. Not "gosh, I'm going to burst!" eating but too much and some decidedly unhealthy things.
Like onion rings.....fried onion rings. Between #2 Son and I, we polished off the whole bag yesterday.
And not a regular sized bag you get at the grocery store.
It was a restaurant supply sized bag.
But it was so good while I was doing it. lol
And then there were breaded chicken strips and 2 boxes of creamed spinach.
Ok, it
was spinach but just too much salt for me now in these premade boxes of it.
So today, I am on a strict food intake plan.
Lots of water.
Mostly veggies(I can use up some of the none prepared veggies I need to save.)
I'll move some more of what is left into the fridge(like those red and yellow pepper strips in the photo there)as the temp. in the freezer is now below refrigeration recommended levels.
And this coming week's menu will see some Mexican food dishes(the peppers and homemade chili I had in the freezer), a meatloaf(also in the freezer), pulled pork(ditto) and 2 beef dishes(since I couldn't fit all the steak I had into the little freezers so I cooked a crockpot full of beef yesterday).
Our #1 Son is coming home for a visit tomorrow and will be here all next week so having to cook all this meat is a happy coincidence, as he's a big time carnivore.
He will be more than happy to help me out and eat all this stuff! lol
As for yesterday and dealing with this deader than a door nail freezer......
Whirlpool was called first, as they claim to have made this lemon.
They will only pay for an authorized repair person to fix this and pay for the parts needed.
A 3 week old freezer and they will repair it NOT replace it.
This did NOT make me happy.
And if I am not happy, watch out.....
The CS person said the soonest she could get me an appt. was in a week.
Fantastic.
Then she went back into her database and found someone else in the area.
She was faxing the information to this authorized repair person and he/she would be calling me later that day to set up an appt.
While I was on hold with Whirlpool the mail lady came to the door to have me sign for a certified letter. It was a summons for #2 Son in regard to his car accident.
Yep, he got a ticket. Between that and his phone bill for July, there goes his whole paycheck he just got.
Now he wasn't happy either.
I felt like I needed to DO something so I chatted online with the credit card company next. I just wanted to have something on record asap with them if this came to having to dispute the charge with Home Despot, if they would not "do" something about the freezer.
In the meantime, while waiting for a call about repairing this POS freezer, I got on my cell to make other calls I needed to make.....like to reschedule a dr. appt. and to find out who was suppose to be sending me a new memory card(flash thingy)for my BiPAP machine, since the insurance had me mail them the card that came in the machine. I ended up yelling at and then hanging up on a division of our insurance company that oversees durable hardware because they never returned my phone call on Monday and made me call again on Friday, plus they didn't include vital information in the literature they are constantly sending me, which would have AVOIDED this whole situation and not had me go 2 WEEKS without a memory card in the BiPAP.
Gee, let's make someone a tad on EDGE already, go over the sanity cliff, shall we?
Then I made a phone call to the contractor/repair person we have used before to schedule when he can come do the things we need doing in the house this Summer.
And he tells me, business is so good(plus they are so behind finishing jobs)that he can't fit me in until January 2014.
WTF?
Didn't someone tell all these people ahead of me on his schedule that there is a recession on and nobody had the money to afford remodeling/repairing stuff??lol
I am glad he was upfront with me, about the long timeline for getting to my jobs, but I was NOT expecting a 6 month wait!
So now I have to go to Plan B.
And no, Plan B is NOT to just not have the repairs done. lol
I'll be calling a franchised handyman service.....better yet, get 2 estimates from 2 different services and decide on which one to hire.
After hours of waiting on the Whirlpool repair person to call me, I thought, "What the hell am I doing here?!? This blasted appliance is THREE WEEKS OLD!? Who should have to REPAIR an appliance that dies when it's practically brand new?! This is Bullshit!"
So I called Home Depot.
Well, first I went on the HD website because that is where I bought this freezer from. And I called their 800 number. And after a solid HALF AN HOUR on hold, they disconnected my call.
After that bullshit, then I called the local Home Depot.
And I started off talking to the poor woman in the appliance dept. I really
really tried not to take my foul mood out on her. It was difficult, believe you me! lol
After explaining what had transpired so far and that I had decided that I just wanted to return the freezer, she put me on hold and went and talked to the store manager. She came back and said that if I could get the freezer to the store, that he would accept it as a return.
WTF?
I told the woman that this was unacceptable, since I didn't own a delivery truck and I would have to RENT one(read SPEND MORE MONEY on this situation!)to return this major appliance. It wasn't a dorm fridge I could shove into the back of my minivan and haul down.
She put me on hold again to go talk to the SM.
She came back and took my name/phone and said the SM would call me back later, as he was in a meeting.
So I left her the information and hung up.
And to my shock and surprise, a couple of hours later, the SM did call me.
After some talk about exchanging this lemon for another of the same freezer(no WAY in HELL!)I said I really wasn't amenable to owning this brand of freezer, especially not the identical model. Having this experience has made me a bit gun shy in regard to owning a freezer.
So he sort of agreed with my POV and said he could come get the freezer on either Tues. or Wed. of next week with the store's truck and refund my credit card.
Now this local HD manager didn't have to make the decision to take this freezer back technically, because even though it was delivered from that store, I had bought it on the website. He could have made me go through channels and waited for corporate to tell him to take it back. But he didn't.
I guess he got a sense that if I had to go through any more bullshit over this stupid freezer, I might rent a truck anyway, bring it back to
his store, dump it in the middle of their parking lot and set it on fire. And he certainly wanted to avoid that, right?
And THAT idea had crossed my mind during the day on more than one occasion......
We did check with our homeowner's insurance, in regards to the loss of all that food when the freezer died and whether it was a coverable event in our policy. Unfortunately for us, lightning didn't take out the freezer or our house hadn't burned down. If it had, we would be entitled to compensation for the value of the food lost.
So in closing......
My son is broke until next payday.
My dr. appts. schedule is fine.
My BiPAP will be carded by early next week.
I have to go to Plan B in regard to our living room repairs.
My fridges are both running crammed full of food.
The credit card bill I paid for June will be retroactively going down when I get a refund on the freezer.
And I have a beautiful
object d'art aka a new non-working freezer sitting in my garage until the middle of next week.
Oh, yes.....and the Whirlpool authorized repair person STILL hasn't called me to set up an appointment 24 hours later.
This means I'll have to continue to Tweet and Facebook about how crappy anything or anyone connected to WHIRLPOOL really is.
Sluggy
And now the fine folks at Whirlpool are offering me an EXTENDED SERVICE PLAN for the freezer I returned to the store!
