The Great Appliance Fiasco

The Great Appliance Fiasco

“The Marion Mom” By Dorothy Wilson Six years ago, we installed all new appliances in our remodeled kitchen, paying a premium for reliable names like Viking, KitchenAid, and Kenmore Elite.

You know when they add Elite to an established brand, it means, “Chaching!”

In my naivete, I thought we would recover our additional upfront costs by avoiding the ubiquitous breakdowns that occur with less reputable but cheaper products. Boy, was I wrong.

I wasn’t just, “Meh,” wrong, either.

I was exorbitantly, immensely, interminably wrong.

About 27 minutes after my five-year warranty expired, my built-in Kenmore Elite stainless steel gargantuan combination- microwaveconvection oven stopped heating food. There’s this thing inside a microwave called a magnetron (No, that’s not the X-Man) that, you know, makes it hot. Kind of important.

Yeah, it was $800 to fix.

Well, the fellow on the phone with Sears told me in a thick Indian accent, “Good news! We have a one-year warranty that you can purchase for $600 that will cover this repair!”

I can do a little consumer math in spite of the fact that I was never trained in Common Core, so I took him up on his offer.

Well, a minute after the new warranty expired, the uber-oven started shooting sparks. Nothing like a little Fourth of July excitement at Thanksgiving!

So I called Sears again, they sent out a different repairman, and he stolidly gave me the news: “You need a new magnetron.”

Then, and only then, did he get to see real fireworks.

On my face. Exploding out of my head.

I may or may not have said some words that can only be printed in ampersands, number signs and and asterisks. I honestly don’t remember.

The guy was baffled, of course, having walked into a fairly straightforward repair, only to have the crazy homeowner expand like a gila monster on the hunt, spewing enraged, unintelligible blather.

However, when he called to order the part, my friendly customer service representative from India offered me the deal of a lifetime: “For $600, we can offer a warranty that will cover not only this repair, but also all the appliances in your home for the year.”

Boy, my ears perked up at that one. I may have even shot the repairman a smile. I mean, in an average home, a $600 appliance warranty may not actually pay for itself.

But I, friends, do not live in an average home.

I live in a hundred-yearold home haunted by an appliance-hating specter who snaps wires and sparks motors like a weekly worship ritual.

I promise, I was salivating. “Okay,” I said, eyes wide and gleaming with anticipation. “I’ll do it.”

Unfortunately, my eagerness got the best of me, and they denied my first claim, made two days into the coverage period, on the basis that I was out of town and couldn’t be sure the icemaker failed within the warranty coverage period. I didn’t know “Warranty begins 1-22018” had a rider on it: “Only if you’re home.”

Regardless, since then, I’ve been making a list and keeping tabs.

Last week, I fortuitously scheduled four — count ‘em, four — simultaneous appliance repairs.

My guy fixed every single problem without a single complaint. I expected to pay a deductible for each repair, but instead, he charged me a single deductible based on the logic that he made one service call.

That’s logic I can stand behind!

That man spent 4 hours at my house cleaning out a rodents’ nest from the oven burner (gross!), cleaning the food-clogged filter in my dishwasher, replacing the heating element on my dryer, and diagnosing the microwave. (He had to order a part.) For $75.

After each piece, he turned to me and showed me how to clean the item, as if the reason it broke down was due to my incompetent housework.

“So,” he started, “You need to clean the dishwasher every month.”

Puzzled and stammering, I asked a dumb question. “I, um, but it’s… how do you clean a dishwasher? I mean, it CLEANS. That’s all it does.” He pointed to the clogged filter and admonished that I should always avoid putting mayonnaise, cheese, and solid food into the dishwasher.

“If I were to do so—and by ‘I,’ I mean the teenagers who do the dishes — how would I go about accessing the filter to clean it myself next time?” I asked, expertly shifting the blame to my kids.

He replied, “Oh, you can’t, really. You have to disassemble the entire manifold to get to it.”

So it’s a filter… that I can’t replace… Thanks, Sears. Y’all are awesome.

More alarming, he showed me an armful of scorched lint that had built up on the heating element inside the body of the Whirlpool dryer.

“So, you need to clean the dryer about once a year,” he said.

I scooped my jaw off the floor and took deep breaths. “How does one clean a… a dryer?”

“Well,” he continued, “You need to hire a serviceman to unstack these machines, take it apart, and vacuum all the lint out. Then hire one of those duct-cleaning services to sweep out the duct.”

“I can’t do that myself?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said.

“You can’t access the housing where this thick layer of lint had built up on the heating element.

You don’t want that to catch fire.”

Yeah, you know who should do something about that? The dim-witted designers of the machine!

You know you’re gonna have lint. It’s. A. Dryer!

Just design it to prevent lint accumulation on the one part that can burn my house down. How’s that sound?

I think Sears should hire me as a design consultant.

I don’t have a degree in engineering, but I have life experience in dumb!

My father, who is known by name at Cliff’s Auto Parts, said he has never had to clean a dryer.

I think maybe I’ll make the kids do it. That’s a warranty I’ve been holding on to for almost 15 years!

If only they could also fix the icemaker for a single deductible, we’d really be in business.

Elite business. Cha-ching!

Dorothy Wilson lives in Marion with her husband Chris as they enjoy all the adventures life with their seven children provides. In addition to her monthly column “ The Marion Mom,” in the Marion Ledger, reprints of her previous columns appear in the e- edition of the Times, online at www. theeveningtimes. com

“The Marion Mom” By Dorothy Wilson