The Battle to Receive the Refrigerator

The refrigerator delivery date was set for one day before thanksgiving. I correctly assessed that they were not coming, just based on past experience. They did not send me an automated text saying the delivery crew was two orders away. Two hours before the end of the delivery window i knew i should have received this text by now and so they in all likelihood didnt even have me in the docket on schedule or the computer would have generated the message by now. 30 minutes later i received a familiar generic message stating that the refrigerator was not able to be delivered and i should call the number listed below to reschedule delivery. This dance again. Reschedule, they dont come, reschedule, they dont come…. What a merry merry dance it was. I was scathing angry because each time they made me eait the whole window of time instead of telling me before hand they werent coming and afterwards i had to go to work and see a day’s worth of patients in half a day. This time the window of delivery was midday…so i had lost morning and midday and now only had mid to late afternoon to do my day’s work. I was through with their playing around. If they werent coming the least they could do is pick morning or evening for delivery so i could have a window of time to get my work done but no, they picked midday. I called the number and they said they’d try to get a hold of the crew and see why they hadn’t delivered. The clever man came back on the phone yelling at me and when i questioned him as to why his tone had changed and what the heck he was yelling at me for he said in a jersey accent, “you want the number or not lady?” I said, “what number? For who? Who are we calling?” He said, “the crew! The crew that was supposed to deliver. You want their number or not?” I thought this was strange as they normally guard their crew members phone numbers and talk to them themselves but i got a pen and took down the number. He hung up. I dialed the number. On the other end of the phone i heard, “hello, this is victoria at the home depot customer service desk. How may i direct your call?” I laughed. Victoria said, “ma’am. Are you there?” I suddenly realized she didnt know why i was laughing. I filled her in on the clever thing jersey accent man had just done. I then told her my story and the story about the washer dryer disaster. She, just like everybody else, told me she’d take 100 dollars off the order for my troubles, and she, just like everybody else who said this didn’t. As far as i know the people promising this have no way to do it, so its an empty gift. I told her many people had promised this and i hadnt seen it happen yet. I asked her whether it would be put back on my card or mailed as a check and she simply didnt answer the question. She chose to remain silent and then move on to something else. I found this response informative. Appease the disgruntled customer and hope they dont check their credit card statement to make sure it was actually done.

I will forever think home depot is wrong for this. The customer service agent told me that the crew had sent a message to me saying they werent coming but they hadnt sent any message to home depot saying they couldnt make the delivery so as far as home depot was concerned they were still coming. I couldnt believe what i was hearing. I asked her if she thought i was making the text message up. Did she think i would make their text message up and wait on hold all this time on a work day to inform her of the text message that had been sent to me saying they werent coming just for kicks and giggles…needed a bit of drama in my day…liked to complain? I asked her why she thought they would send it if they didnt mean it. Did she think they accidentally hit the button to send an automated message that the delivery couldnt be made but they were still coming afterall? She asked me if i wanted to wait thirty minutes to see if they arrived and then if not call back again and we could go from there. What asinine tactic is that? They’ve just messaged and said they’re not coming so i should waste half an hour more and wait fifteen minutes further on hold to explain it all again to a different representative under what theory? The theory that they’re wrong about their expressed intention to not come? I wanted to say to her “are you daft?” But i remained civil. I informed her that i still had to go to work and so i was going to be very angry if i waited further after they said in plain bloody english that they are not coming, and they didnt come, and thats more unpaid time away from a huge workday that i still have to do even though we’re nearing lunchtime now. She then hit me with it can either be my fault they didnt come or their third party contracted delivery company’s fault that they didnt come. If i wasnt there during the full window of delivery, they could say i had to pay for the next delivery because this crew arrived and i wasnt there. So i had to stay for the full 4 hours even though we all knew they were not coming, so that i could have the privilege of announcing the absence of delivery was still their doing and not mine. I called back in half an hour on the dot and said they still did not deliver would they believe me now? This representative said of course she believed me that it said on their computer the delivery could not be made and had said so for forty five minutes and she wasnt sure why the other lady told me there wasnt any message on their end because they’d had it all along. So she was daft. I frowned. Exactly what i had said would happen happened. I’d waited for nothing when i could have gone off to work, but home depot has their rules and i wasnt about to be blamed for absence of delivery d*mm*t!

Home depot is not helping me change my opinion that people do trash things on the regular nowadays and that’s just become the norm. Ive been a part of companies where this was so and if its what you have to do to make a paycheck, people do. This is just the day and age we live in. The third party company and home depot had the audacity to send me the automated survey asking me if i was satisfied with their performance during my delivery. What do you think? I had the sense to just hang up because i didnt have anything nice to say and was too exhausted to do anything other than what would have been banshee screaming into the phone. Once it was established delivery was indeed cancelled i called the number to reschedule the delivery again. No one answered. I guess jersey accent guy was out to lunch. I called home depot customer service again to reschedule (which involved them calling the third party…they usually picked up for them but not for me). Home depot asked why i hadnt called the number myself. I told them i did but they never answer. She called and they answered. At first she said they claimed they had been to my property and knocked but nobody was home and they had called my phone but i didnt answer. I called bull on that right quick and told her they were flat out lying. She called them back. Over the course of 45 minutes the story changed to they had been there and knocked but nobody answered and they had tried to call but didnt have cell service. I called bull again. She got fed up with being the go between. I hung up, called customer service again, waited on hold, got a different agent, they called again and came back with another story that they had tried to search for the property but didnt find it and so just took off. I called bull on this because i said i never got the automated notification that they were two hours away which always comes about 1.5 hours before they show up if they actually have me on schedule. They would have been far from my small town at this point and had access to internet so if i was actually on the delivery schedule why didnt i get that automated notification? After forty five minutes the lying liar pants admitted that they didnt want to go to center point in the middle of nowhere 1 day before thanksgiving and so they just crossed me off the delivery list. Lying lying fire pants f*cks! Dont play f*cking mind games with me man, my parents invented that sh*t and you will not win.

Home depot asked me if i would like to cancel my thanksgiving plans with my family to receive delivery of the fridge again. I believe my words were, “No, because you’re not coming, and i already know that, so it doesnt make sense to cancel my holiday to wait for you to not come. Pick another day.” So they picked another day, a monday. I was so beyond mentally done with this order. I showed up for work and everyone asked, “did you finally get the fridge?!” “No.” I showed up at the dollar general for ice that night and they asked, “Got your fridge?!” And i said, “obviously, No.”

I called ahead and gave yet a fifth set of even more kindergarten style instructions on how to get to the property…as if the first four were not enough. In the instructions i included all the places that one could get cell reception to call me from…the shell gas station, the post office…theres only one in town it wouldnt be hard to find. I also stated if they still couldnt find it after five sets of instructions they were to call me and i would come to where they were and lead them in with my car and all they’d have to do is follow me with their eyes. I also informed home depot that i was not going to take “we couldnt find it so we left” as an acceptable answer with five sets of instructions, pictures, long and lat coordinates, and cell reception instructions as well as my offer to come get them and lead them in and it was their duty to communicate this with their contracted company because if they keep doing this no one will ever come and do they really want to be having this conversation with me weekly for a year?!

Now Monday i took a different tactic. I decided to use murphy’s law to ensure that my refrigerator was coming. They were scheduled for the afternoon. So, i finished my work in the morning and drove home. I did not clean the house. I did not clean the bathroom. I didnt dust. I didnt move the furniture out in the yard. I didnt move the gardening things from the porch. I didnt prepare the property at all for company or the delivery of a large object. Then i set my phone aside and took a nap. It worked. I was awoken to a crew standing on my porch and a truck in my yard. Yes! Yes! Yes! Murphy’s law worked! Not ready for company, here’s company. The crew had my fridge. That was all i cared about, but they had sent me the crew from shovanistic hell, which i was ignoring, because as i said, they had my fridge. One of the men asked me repeatedly whether i was married. I asked what that mattered as to whether he could bring my fridge inside the house. He pricked a bit and said, “well im just thinking if you had a husband to do some of the work around here maybe you would have more time to clean and make things not so dusty, you know?” I swallowed my desire to punch him in the neck and crush his eyeballs with my thumbs while he struggled to breathe. I told myself, i have to be sweet until he has taken the refrigerator off the truck and plugged it in. I told him i didnt have a husband. He asked me repeatedly why and when i finally answered i was honest “too much work. I like to be the boss around here.” He said, “oh, you just havent met the right man. If you met a real man you’d instinctively roll over and let him be the boss, a man like me.” Cute. Super original. Never heard that one before. If you cant tell my words are dripping with sarcasm. I ignored his comment and set about moving furniture out of the way. The man started scoping out my yard. He asked, “can i put a house over there?” He was pointing to next to the shed. I thought he was doing more of his preferred brand of joking, ridiculous, but he followed that up with the statement, “i’d buy that piece of land from you, from the side of the shed to where the fence is there.” Somehow, in this man’s delusional mind, he thought that his delivery of a refrigerator included the process of divvying up my 2 acres and taking about a third of it so he could suddenly become an unwanted neighbor and i could have less land. I was sure he figured boyfriend was the next natural step to living in my former yard. I ignored him and walked over to the second guy. I said, “is this the fridge?” The guy nodded. The first guy said, “so why you dont want a husband?” I ignored him. I’d already answered the question. The fridge was here and i was determined to get it into the house and working before i hurt this man. The second guy rolled his eyes and set the dolly beside the fridge, “come on man, help me…”. The first guy said, “just a minute.” The second guy sat down in the back of the open truck. I was fuming angry. We were going backwards. I needed the second guy standing and the refrigerator moving not stationary. What on earth was this jack ass’s problem. I considered helping the second guy move the fridge myself, but i wasnt sure how loyal he was to his buddy and didnt want to risk botching the delivery that i’d been waiting 6.5 weeks for. I turned to the man and deployed a different tactic…dumb cutesy girl. I made my voice a bit high and soft and said, “im so excited to see this refrigerator. Ive been waiting so long to get it.” The man said, “how long you been waiting for a man?” I continued to play dumb, “well ive been waiting for a crew to deliver 6 weeks but they didnt come the first time so i had to wait another half a week.” The guy was laughing. I knew what i said. I said it to give him something without giving him what he wanted so he might bring the refrigerator in. It worked. He went to the truck and helped the second guy get the refrigerator off the truck and up the porch steps. He asked me where the water line for the refrigerator was. I said, “there isn’t one. I ordered a fridge without an ice maker because there isnt a water hook up on this wall. He said, “well they sold you one.” And handed me a coiled up metal pipe. They had charged me $18.95 for a tube to hook a refrigerator without a connection to a wall without a water line. To add insult to injury the regular pipe was $15.00 but they had upgraded to a braided one because i guess they felt i should pay for the best. He told me to take it to home depot for a refund, which i did the following day…another headache in itself. They said their computer recused the refund and three computers later they put the money back on a cancelled card which i already told them was cancelled due to fraud and offered to accept home depot credit so they did that and then discover contacted me wanting to know why i was still having transactions on the cancelled card and didnt i give the companies i use my new card number. But i digress. I now have a refrigerator in my house. They are breaking it out of all the styrofoam and the guy says, “you want me to be your husband?” I said, “why would i want that? I dont even know you.” He said, “you just seem like you need a man, all by yourself out here in the wilderness.” I said, “im not by myself. I have two dogs and a couple machetes. Im good.” I put on my best, “whatever” face and played dumb while he scanned the room trying to guess where i’d hidden the machetes. I knew he’d spotted one when he stood up dusted himself off and asked, “okay, any questions about your fridge?” I said, “is it plugged in and working?” He said, “yep.” I said, “no further questions. You may go.” The second guy exited the house and headed for the truck. I had meant to tip him as i told myself if anyone actually came out here no matter what kind of job they did i’d tip them because no one ever comes out here and im trying to change that by making it worth their while. But he was out of there and in the truck so fast i didnt get a chance. I tipped asshole shovanist and asked him to send the second guy back to the porch for his tip. The guy said, “oh that’s okay you can just hand it to me and i’ll give it to him. I could tell by the smirk on his face he was going to keep both wads of money and tell his partner i hadnt tipped, further confirmed by the fact that he put both wads in the same pocket instead of separating them so his partner could have one wad, but my machetes were to my back and i was unwilling to move from where i stood and put asshole in a position where he was closer to them than i was, so i let it go. Asshole’s partner would have to look after himself. As the delivery truck took off down the driveway my dogs barked and snarled at them. I went inside to see if it was true that the refrigerator was plugged in and running. It was. The nightmare was over. I had all the purchased home depot appliances inside the house and was done dealing with them…well, officially done the following day after battling out the refund over the unnecessary water line coil they had sold me the upgraded version of for God knows why. Home Depot’s final word on the matter was that they had no record that i was ever intended to receive any refund for my troubles and they would let their quality control team know the experience i had had with their delivery service so that they can make improvements. Empty empty words. Half the problem i had had was with their poor customer service at home depot. Half the problem i had had was with the contracted delivery service not showing up. I blamed all parties involved for their failings and i had forgiveness for no one. They did that thing they have to do where they ask, “would you recommend home depot products to a friend or family member for future purchases”. The answer was no. They asked me if i’d mind writing a short essay about why. I turned and left.

After speaking to my boss at work i realize i have an unusual relationship with my refrigerator. I’ve always budgeted for one week at a time, bought exactly what i needed for the week, and pretty much emptied the fridge by a week’s time and the next shopping day. My boss says their fridge is always full and they have stuff expire or go to waste because they cant see whats in back of it and never have it empty before buying more. I think i never fully stock the refrigerator because most of what i eat is fruit and veg, which doesnt last months at a time, and also because im not wealthy enough to buy more than a week’s worth of food at a time. Im not living the american dream, im living my dream. I have a job i care about that is peaceful and where im appreciated and can make a difference in peoples lives. I have land and a house small and simple enough for me to manage. I have dogs, chickens, and fruit trees. No, i dont live a life of excess and feel financially secure but what small town farmer or rancher ever did? If i want to live on a homestead surrounded by farms and ranches…well worrying about money and the weather is just part of the day out here.

Side note: when my patients and coworkers asked, “did you get your fridge?” And i finally answered “yes!” There was cheering and jumping up and down and we celebrated the occasion with so much clapping and screaming. I strolled into the dollar general and announced, “guess who doesnt need ice?!” Both employees and all 4 customers went, “you got your fridge!!!!” More jumping and cheering. Now whenever my former patient’s four sons come to eat breakfast with her they all say good morning to everybody and they always ask, “fridge still runnin?” And i answer emphatically that its wonderful, and they all laugh and say, “good, good.”