Tuesday, March 6, 2012

when the appliance gods hate you.

i must live on some geologic magma displaced magnetic fault. how to say this ... we've replaced the same. ... no. we have a stove that has been replaced ... nope. that's not it either.

ok: we have had to replace a stove 3 times in the 12 years we've lived here.

the current one and the one preceding it are "radiant ceramic cooktops" woooOOOo. that's a fancy word for momma don't like electric, she likes gas, so this is the closest she can get without installing a gas line into the house. the first stove was a standard electric coil. but it smelled like peanut oil from the previous owners and died about two months after we moved in. its left front and right rear burners died.  that behavior don't fly with me when i'm pregnant and new in a house with a two-year-old. come to think of it though, i have to wonder when is it an appropriate time in the life of a busy mother for a major appliance to become insane? it's not like they're dead or broken... my appliances just sorta work when they feel like it. aHA! they're like teenagers. got it. that makes so much more sense now. 

the second stove / range / cooktop WHATevuh, worked for about 2 years and then wouldn't turn off. it was great fun for yours truly. it happened when i was hosting a "pampered chef" party (yes, this is true, no i swear i'm not lying) and the oven turned on to something like 895˚ all by it's little ol' self.  i'd feared all my friends and i shared menopausal hot flashes simultaneously due to some dip we ate from our presenter. i thought, "oh great. no one will ever want to come back to my house..."

ha! ha! ha! ha.... the dip was fine. it was the stove! it wouldn't turn off! i had to go down to the basement and throw the circuit breaker to spare all our lives! silly GE.

after the refrigerator stole my cat (that's a joke), we'd determined that the appliances were taken over by the demon possessing that 1958 Plymouth Fury in Steven King's Christine. after her indelicacies had been discovered in that car, she'd decided to move on and had taken up residence in various appliances in my life.

there was the washing machine that wouldn't wash. it apparently was the Woolite model. "just soak in cold water for 3 minutes and rinse" became "just soak in cold water for 5 hours." no really, "just soak."

as a teenager, we had a dryer that only burned clothes. that was fun. and in the era that preceded its incineration stage, the door wouldn't stay shut so we propped a shovel against it to keep it closed. maybe it was trying to tell us something when it actually growled, "YOUR SOUL IS MINE, AND SO ARE YOUR UNDIES" the day it set ablaze my bloomies. the tuesday ones too. i didn't know my fanny was ever that smokin'.

i used to have a snoopy hair dryer that my husband gave me when we first got married. snoopy apparently was jealous of my long raven locks and decided to pull several of them together into his fan and tangled them up into a formation resembling what you'd normally find on a shower drain. snoopy was wrong though, my husband loved ME more. when i threw him out, he made that "waaaaaaayaayaayaaaaaailllll" sound.

and a waffle maker that preferred its secret "frisbee" or "hockey puck" modes to anything else we anticipated.

so the stove we have now works on three burners instead of the four we paid for five years ago when we bought it with the intention of using all four whenever we felt like it.

the irony is that i think this particular stove is either the "how ya like me now?" or the "up yours" models we'd heard so much about but thought we'd avoided. one of the splendid vagaries of the "up yours" model, is what's called the "that's what you think" mode. when you're cooking something, the burners intermittently decide to work and then, oh... stop.

the difference between the one we have and the "up yours" model is that the "up yours" simply burns everything. the more i think about it, i believe the second stove was an "up yours" model. i'd say we lucked out. i'd much rather have potential food poisoning than no dinner at all.

part of the fun of the "how ya like me now?" model is its coquettish antics. the left front burner, the largest one on the surface is seldom used because of its size. i don't know about you, but i like the skin on my forearms just the way it is and i don't use our 15" skillet if i can help it because i also fancy the tendons leading to my wrists. so i'm guessing the burner in question that we seldom use has decided to go on strike because it feels unloved.

now, true to human nature, because we are now disallowed the opportunity to use the burner that we paid for, she has taken her ball and gone home. hmph! no dinner and a movie even. so, because i am a human, top of the food chain, i took a ladle and banged the front panel of the range. HEY! it worked for The Fonz. (culture / age restriction notice: if you don't know who The Fonz is, you need to go to YouTube and look him up ... oh, here: The Fonz) all you cats who dig The Fonz can sit on it! ;) and when i banged the front panel of the range i dented it. three times.

Christine won.

so here we are, with our 3/4 grudge-holding, "how ya like me now?" stove,  whatever, cooktop, and our smoldering desires to use that burner now that it doesn't work. suddenly nothing can be cooked the way that burner that we never really used can cook them.

what IS that about people? when i was pregnant, i was told to not eat soft cheeses. all i wanted after that was soft cheeses. once i had the baby, i didn't want the soft cheeses. when we are told not to have caffeine suddenly it's all we can think about?! "don't smoke!" i want a cigarette. "don't swear!" grabinatizin abterfrakin.

now i want my burner back. i guess that means a call to Rick! the repairman. woobooouy.

thank you.

2 comments:

  1. I have a lot of gas appliances and It’s not easy to find a reliable gas supplier that provides gas at cost effective prices

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'll bet. I wish I had a gas appliance, but I think you're giving me good advice. Thanks!

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