The Chill Factor

“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”…as the song says.

Two weeks ago Sunday our refrigerator went out. Our Maytag, freezer on the bottom, as seen on “I Want That”, all too expensive refrigerator went haywire. All of the control panel lights were blinking and the water dispenser flapper was steady opening and closing. Just what we need. Something else messed up.

I complained at work that morning and my friend Paul suggested we call Maytag and see if they would do anything. “Why?” I said, it’s four years old, out of warranty. So we called a local repair guy to come take a look. He came right on Monday afternoon. Took about five minutes trying to reset the panel without any luck, told us we needed a part that would probably cost around $700 and charged us $40. OH. MY. We are just getting our heads above water after the wedding. We certainly didn’t have $700 to spare.

Thankfully we have the twenty year old spare frig in the utility. What a lifesaver our ever faithful GE was. We even discussed just bringing it into the kitchen since we didn’t have money to get the other one fixed right away.

We waited for the guy to call and verify the cost of the part. Never heard from him. My husband finally called him and he said “oh, I need to listen to my voice mails and I’ll call you back”. Never heard from him.

So, I figured if this man could find a Maytag part so could I. I got online and started looking. I found that several others had the exact same problem as we did. All the solution guys said “Call Maytag, they have a repair kit”. Okay. I call Maytag. The very nice service rep says yes, they’ve been having this problem and would send a part and set up a service guy to come out. Whoa, I said, how much will this cost? The guy says “not anything. It’s on us”. WHAT? You mean I’m actually getting a break on something?

It took a few days to get the part because it was on backorder since so many people needed it. But it finally came and the official Maytag service guy came and put it on in about five minutes. No charge. Whew.

I guess this story has about three morals:
1. The Lord gives us blessings in ways we least expect it.
2. Sometimes it’s a good thing when a service man is lousy about returning calls.
3. Paul is smarter than I thought he was.