This post is also available in: Română (Romanian)

An alternative title would be: How not to rush into throwing money away.

One day about two weeks ago, an error appeared on our refrigerator and it stopped cooling at all. It had never done this before, and the error code wasn’t even listed in the instruction manual. To make matters worse, it had just gone past its 5-year warranty period. Yep, 5 years, we had an extended warranty included. We called the Beko service center, and they scheduled an appointment for us. More on that towards the end. But just like that, our refrigerator was ready for the “doctor.”

But it was mid-August, with tropical heat outside, not a good time to be without a refrigerator. So, Cata and I decided to get a mini-fridge until the service guys came to see what was wrong with the refrigerator. Said and done, we went to Media Galaxy and bought a mini-fridge.

This little one worked okay; we could at least put milk in it or a few basic things that any civilized person has in their fridge. By the way, the days without a refrigerator made us wonder how people used to manage in the old days without a fridge during the hot months. It seems like a basic thing that’s impossible to live without today. Anyway, let’s get back to the story.

While waiting for the service to come home and diagnose (for a fee) what was wrong with the old clunker, I kept looking at refrigerators online. And I thought that every cloud has a silver lining, maybe we could get ourselves a refrigerator that makes ice. And I found it. A bit expensive, but in the end (after about 5 minutes), I convinced Cata to order it. We chose Altex online, and theoretically, a product in stock in Arad should have been delivered on the same day or, at most, the next day, but it took from Monday to Friday morning.

Friday morning, the new refrigerator arrived, the delivery guys were very unprofessional, they left the fridge on the terrace and said they couldn’t handle it anymore, that it wouldn’t fit through the door, that they weren’t allowed to bring it in without the packaging, all sorts of excuses. This even though we paid for delivery “with 2 people to your home.” Anyway, Cata and I managed to get it into the kitchen. Very nice of Altex to let a pregnant woman struggle… but we succeeded, we had the new refrigerator in the house.

But wait, I forgot to tell you a detail that changes the course of the story: on Wednesday, a few days before the new fridge was delivered, Cata calls me from the kitchen while I was working: FILIP, the fridge is working, it’s back on. Apparently, the old fridge went through a defrost cycle and then started cooling again. So, here’s where we were: a large side-by-side fridge working, a mini-fridge next to it also working, and another slightly larger fridge on the way.

So, we kind of rushed into buying a mini-fridge and another new super-expensive fridge because we didn’t have the patience to let the old fridge go through a defrost cycle.

But every cloud has a silver lining: now we have a mini-fridge upstairs in the room where we work out, we gave the old fridge to my parents, and we have a new fridge that also makes ice – it’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of.

And to get back to the little detail about the Beko technicians – tomorrow it will be 3 weeks since we called and have an appointment, but no one has come yet to see what’s wrong with the fridge that actually works. This even though the fridge is no longer under warranty and we were supposed to pay for the diagnosis – 120 lei and 1 leu per kilometer for travel from their headquarters to our home. I wonder, if we really needed service for the fridge during a heatwave, what would we have done these 3 weeks? I’m really curious if anyone will call me again or if they’ll just forget about it.