It was one year and one week ago.
We’d already dealt with a shitstorm of stupid that week: our refrigerator decided to call it quits the same day an ice dam pulled a gutter off the back of our house.
Appliance Center to the rescue (at least for the refrigerator part), right? They’d been our go-to retailer for large appliances for years — decent selection, competitive prices, free delivery.
So, I took a day off of work, and spent the morning transferring the contents of the refrigerator into cardboard boxes in the chilly garage.
Once my night-shift husband was up and about, the whole family schlepped twenty minutes south to the Appliance Center Home Store in Maumee, Ohio. Armed with the measurements of the refrigerator recess area in our kitchen, along with a helpful salesperson and complimentary popcorn to keep our then-three-year-old son occupied, we finally found one that would fit the available space and that had ice and water dispensers. One, as in, we took the floor model.
We wished we’d had more options, but we have an oddly-shaped space for our fridge, and we weren’t willing to take out cabinetry just to have a different fridge. Plus, hey, we’ve got the setup for an ice dispenser, so why not use it? So, the Bosch model it was. We paid for our purchase and scheduled delivery for the next day — a Saturday, in the afternoon.
The delivery guys showed up near the beginning of their 2pm – 5pm delivery window. Our son miraculously napped through the entire delivery process: opening the front double-doors in the dead of winter, removing interior doors, dollies coming in and out, all of it.
With the preparations complete, the Appliance Center guys went back out to the truck to start moving things.
Inside, my husband and I waited… and waited… and waited. Finally, we looked out the kitchen window, out the back, and saw the truck half in the turnaround with the delivery guys staring at it. One of them was on his cell phone.
My husband went out to investigate.
