Our Oven: A Series of Unfortunate Events

It's like a miracle. We have an oven. Not only do we have an oven, but it WORKS. That's key, people. It turns on, and it heats up to the desired temperature AND IT STAYS THERE. It's freakin' amazing. Mostly because um, we just got it. Days ago.


We first noticed that the oven wasn't working when we were preparing a meal for our friends. I preheated the oven to 350 degrees but even after waiting several minutes past that familiar your-oven-is-ready-for-you-ma'am-BEEP, the oven clearly wasn't anywhere near 150 degrees, let alone 350. It made for an interesting meal. We let our landlord know and he asked us to schedule an appointment for a GE service technician to come out. After taking a look at it, the technician gave us a quote for over $1,000. A large fee for any oven, but most especially for that one, seeing as it was 14 years old. Even the technician told us that it wasn't worth the fix and that we should get a new oven, and we of course agreed. I scanned the quote and we sent it to our landlord along with an explanation and our thoughts. We'd also taken the initiative to research ovens and found several very nice ovens that were much less than $1,000. It was a no-brainer for us.

Not so for the landlord. He and his assistant flip-flopped more times than John Kerry (here, here or here...), and I really couldn't understand it. I am a fairly logical person, sometimes even too logical (Caleb will wholeheartedly agree with me here), and I just couldn't wrap my head around it. Why was it even a question?! You pay less money for a new oven that will continue to work for years! How long did he expect it to continue working? But after a week or two of deliberating (yes...a week or two...) they decided they wanted to fix the old oven. Which, fine. Whatever. We didn't want a NEW oven, really, we just freaking wanted a working oven. It just so happened to make more sense to spend less for a new one. So I called GE again and scheduled them to fix it. Finally, we were getting it fixed.

Except that we weren't. GE showed up and basically said "Hi. What are we doing today?" Um, yes, you're FIXING OUR OVEN. As discussed. But of course, you guessed it, it wasn't discussed. GE had failed to mention to the independent contractors (grrrr.....) that we were fixing the oven. So now we needed to not only reschedule, we needed to order the parts. Fabulous. We did, and waited another week for the parts to arrive.

Remember, this is our oven. Just wanted to remind you.

The parts finally arrived, yee-hoo, and I called GE. "Oh, yes Ma'am, we've already scheduled an appointment for you for tomorrow!" WELL. That's a step in the right direction, isn't it? The next morning Caleb is waiting at home for the appointed service call, sometime between 8 am and noon (We'll be there sometime between 6 am and 6 pm, and yes you need to stay at home the entire day....). And yup, you guessed it, there was a glitch. This time, however, a very unexpected one.

I get a call at work from Caleb and he says, "Kim, GE called. They said that (our landlord) called them and ordered a new oven. We're getting it sometime next week."

YEAH! WE'RE GETTING A NEW OVEN! SMART MOVE! FINALLY!

And........when were they going to tell us that? Just curious......

So we had to wait another week. Fantabulous. I was getting a little sad, thinking about retiring our itty-bitty George Foreman, missing already the lingering smell of grilled chicken from three days ago. And cereal. All that cereal for dinner.

You can see why, when I mentioned a few days ago that we may be getting our oven the next day, I was a little hesitant.

But it's here, in all it's $500 glory. Caleb and I both left work early that day to watch them put it in. After six weeks of waiting, it was like going to Disneyland for the first time. Magical.