Our new fridge has been leaking. It started right after we got it in November: we'd wake up in the morning and there would be an ominous puddle in the floor. At first we weren't sure if it was an ominous dishwasher puddle or an ominous refrigerator puddle, because we have a tiny galley kitchen in a 1923 house where none of the floors are quite level. "Argh," one of us would say to the other, "there is a puddle in the floor." "Argh indeed," the other would say, wiping it up. I cannot in good conscience recommend the "argh at it and see if it goes away" management strategy for minor appliance malfunctions, but in this case it worked for a while. After about a week, the puddles disappeared. But we started seeing puddles again shortly after Christmas, sometimes twice a day.
I called to schedule a repair visit. That's the kind of thing I often put off, because I expect it will be annoying, and lo it was annoying. The person at the call center kept calling me Mr. Gladly, and didn't seem to register that we have no plumbing attached to the fridge-- no ice maker, no water dispenser. Note to Future Jamie, though: it is much better to bite the bullet and get the 10 minutes of annoying out of the way. They scheduled a visit for the next day; the repair guy showed up within the promised window; the fix is easy.
Our fridge is supposed to have a plastic pan underneath it to catch the water generated by its self-defrosting mechanism. This pan is easy to break, apparently, because it's plastic. If you load it on a dolly, you have to do it just so or you'll crack the pan. Maybe the third-party delivery folks accidentally cracked it and thought we wouldn't notice the absence of a pan? Who can say? The repair guy, an extremely nice fellow named Phil, showed me how to slide the pan in when it arrives in the mail. "If you have trouble," he assured me, "it's under warranty. We'll come out and do it." I'm pretty sure we can handle a part installation that requires only two screws, but it's always good to have a backup plan. For now he has slipped a spare jelly roll pan into that spot, so we should be puddle-free until the new part arrives.
We are almost 14 years into owning this house, and I am finding that we work around a number of low-level annoyances instead of resolving them. Have you ever read the paper called The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad? It's about the outsize impact of low-level annoyances, CONFIRMED BY SCIENCE. So I am writing this post in case you have your own "thing not so bad" niggling at you today. Probably it's not your fridge; probably you have not been saying to yourself every morning "what if it's not water what if it's coolant what if the whole thing is breaking dying and Sears won't replace it because they've gone out of business alas what if" (because probably your brain is less likely to loop repeatedly through worst-case scenarios than mine), but I bet you have an annoying ten-minute phone call on your list that could make your life more pleasant once you suffered through the annoying part. This is a gentle nudge from me to you: go for it!
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