27.39 easy steps to get yo stuff cold again.
Before your fridge goes down, it’s important to have a little talk with it about WHEN it’s going to shit out on you. Fridges are sentient beings after all, and though they’re malicious entities, they can see reason. Ask your fridge to wait until your wife goes out of town for a week so you’re the only one watching your small kids. If they’re in school, make sure it’s spring break. Also it’d be good if you could make sure at least some of your kids are sick. Bonus-see if you can be sick as well, really locks in the flavor of despair.
Step 1: Denial
Open the fridge. Notice it seems a tad warm, and a few things in the freezer are softening like when your mom calls in the middle of those 5 rare minutes you’re alone with your wife and/or cell phone. Decide that it’s probably nothing. Maybe mercury being in retrograde is causing things to be a bit warmer. Crank down the fridge thermostat and call it good.
Step 2: Buy a bunch of grocceries
Remember there’s some concept called thermal mass. Something to do about heavy things making the temperature harder to change or whatever. So if you put a bunch of perishable stuff in there, it should make the fridge colder, right? Not sure what thermodynamics means, but sounds good to me.
Step 3: Reality hits
Oh shit. All that stuff is melting. WTF? And I guess that means all this crap in the fridge isn’t edible. Especially not by kids who are already sick.
Step 4: Get pissed off at the world
Ask why the gods have decided to punish you in such a manner. What did you do to them? Cry a little bit, then get really mad at the world for conspiring to fuck with you right now.
Step 5: Grieve the loss
Of all your food. Like the half of a deer that’s still left after you killed her last fall-sure, you’d planned on enjoying venison steaks and making some delicious stews for your family. A proper honor for such a beautiful animal who gave its life so your family could eat. Now the sacrifice is in vain. Question the existence of justice in the world, or if anything really matters. And oh shit-all the ice cream is melted!!
Step 6: Throw everything away!!!
Start by only throwing away the stuff that you think is affected by getting warm. Then realize the whole reason you put stuff in the fridge was to keep things from going bad. It dawns on you… Fuck. All of it has to go. Like some tweaker with OCD, proceed to throw away EVERYTHING.
Step 7: Consider your options
Your awesome wife fixed the fridge a few years back by replacing the thermostat. Maybe it’s that again? Try to watch youtube videos on how to fix a fridge, but constantly get interrupted by your kids beating each other up, and then crying about you throwing away all the pizza they wanted to eat this week. Google the price of new fridge, and see it’s at least a grand. Google how much it costs to get someone to repair your fridge-about half the price of a new fridge and it’ll be a week until they can get to you.
Step 8: Fall into a pit of despair and self-pity
Curl up into the fetal position and cry your little heart out as your kids run up and kick you in the balls over and over again. Wonder if this is just the way things are now, and your job in life now is to suffer through first world misery.
Step 9: Wallow in the above a bit more
Repeat step 8 a few more times for good measure. Just really soak it up. All part of the process.
Step 10: Finally realize your being a bitch
Yeah dude, it’s a fucking fridge. Remember of all the shit you’ve been through, this is relatively tame. Recognize that you fell into some stupid victim mentality crap in the above steps. Forgive yourself; your human. Decide to not let this fridge defeat you.
Step 11: Go on offense
Order a pizza for the kids. Check your budget-oh yeah, you found this FIRE concept a while back, so you probably have several multiples of the amount it would cost to buy the most baller fridge at Home Depot. Look at the fridge, and give it a really stern look. Tell the fridge it better start to shape up or it can get to steppin’. Maybe call it a motherfucker. If you do, make sure you sound like Sam Jackson (at least in your head).
Your oldest asks you what motherfucker means….
Decide to at least try to fix your fridge before getting a new one. You don’t want to pollute the already destroyed environment by throwing another discarded fridge on the heap. Your fridge would probably be the last straw, causing the planet to descend into some Mad Max style dystopia. Plus think of the whales.
If you can’t fix this thing, well I guess fuck the whales. At least you can afford a new fridge. And Home Depot does free delivery!!!
Step 12: Watch all the Youtube
Fend off the kids with your legs, thus leaving you free to watch all the videos ever made about repairing fridges. Your like Neo in the fucking Matrix learning kung fu. Almost exactly the same, except completely different in every way. What the hell happened to Trinity anyways? Was that her in Jessica Jones? Oh yeah, fixing fridges. Keep watching.
Step 13: You know Kung Fu
Or you kinda understand how fridges work. Something about aligning chakras to pull cold air from another plane of reality. Well, maybe you’re not too clear on the underlying theory, but you now know very basic troubleshooting and build a game plan:
- Make sure they fridge is getting power. Yup, it’s plugged in. You’re not a complete fucking idiot
- Clean the coils with a vacuum while your youngest beats you with a plastic tea party set. That didn’t fix it. Shit….well whatever, that would have been too easy.
- Figure out which relatively cheap plastic part is most likely to fail. Buy a replacement thermostat of dubious origin from Amazon for like 15 bucks. That one didn’t work. Move onto more troubleshooting.
- What the hell is all that clicking? Oh, guess it’s the start relay thing. Buy an even more sketchy replacement version from Amazon.
- Pray it’s the start relay while waiting for it to be delivered; as the next step is replacing the compressor, which involves welding and pumping compressed nitrogen into it. Decide if it comes to that, it’s new fridge time.
- Replace the start relay, which is about as hard as building a deinosuchus with legos.
Step 14: Tears of joy
Your fridge is pumping out cold air!! Holy shit! You did it! You can do anything!
Step 15: Mix relief with anxiety
Umm, yeah, the fridge is working. But will that cheap part you got last? And the fridge is too cold now. Engage youtube again, and throw up your hands and say “fuck it”. Decide to not buy too many groceries that need refrigeration for the next week so you can determine if this fucker is working properly. This should also be long enough for complaceny to set in.
There it is, how to fix(?) your fridge. A pretty simple process that can be a fun little emotional roller coaster and spiritual journey, all mixed into one. Hope you enjoyed this heavily sarcastic summary of my past week! All in all, it’s actually been kind of entertaining.
How’s your week going? Have you ever ventured into the abyss of appliance repair?
