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Ice ice baby
Last month the ice maker in our refrigerator broke. So I called the
manufacturer and for a hefty price, they arranged for a local repair company
to repair or replace the ice maker. About a week later, the technician showed
up, failed to remove the broken unit, and decided that it needed replacing
and would be back in a few days.
The following week the technician showed up again, bitched that we failed to
answer his messages. I explained that I set my phone to have a silent default
ring tone due to spam, and a default text tone of silence, again due to spam
(and man, the amount of text spam I recieved from politicians during election
season was staggering! Damn you policitians and exempting yourselves from
spam laws! Damn you all to hell!). The technician was nonplussed and said I
should do something about that. We gave him Bunny's phone number as she
doesn't have a silent default ring tone.
The technician also realized he had the wrong model of ice maker. He said he
would order yet another replacement and get back with us when he had the new
ice maker. That was the week of Thanksgiving, so it wasn't too surprising
that we didn't hear back that week.
Well, now it's the following week and we hadn't heard anything. But I failed
to keep notes and didn't have a phone number of the actual company doing the
work. Nor was I sure of the name of the company doing the work. The
manufacturer had set this all up, so today I called the manufacturer to see
what was going on.
Three times.
Twice my cell phone died because the battery isn't worth it anymore. And
that's the replacement battery—the original battery wasn't worth it either.
And each time, I had to start over with a new person, only to die just prior
to any form of resolution. It was on the third call, using Bunny's phone,
plugged into mains power to ensure her phone's battery didn't die on me, that
I finally got the number to the company they contracted for work.
I then called the contractor company and was told that the work had been
completed and accepted by us! If I wanted, I could make a new ticket to
repair or replace our “new” ice maker, but the ticket was closed. Even when I
told the representative that the technician failed to replace the ice maker,
I was just told the work order was closed. I told them I wasn't going to pay
the hefty price again and I was told to take that up with the warantee
company, who paid them to do the work, which was done, by the way.
I called the manufacturer back, and this was a very surreal call. I explained
the situation; they then called the contracting company (and I waited on hold
for this), only to be told they were given the same story as I was given—the
work was completed, the order is done. The representative had me check the
ice maker and yes, I did find a serial number, model number and a lot number.
I rattled off said information and the representative was surprised that we
had apparently installed an ice maker from their competitor. I said it was
the unit installed when we received the refrigerator and had been working for
well over a year, but the representative said the model number just didn't
match the model numbers they used. And as the contracting company refused to
do anything, I was told I should probably dispute the charges with the credit
card company.
I guess.
I have to wonder what happened … did the technician just close the wrong
ticket? Just said “XXXX it, that couple was a pain to work with” and just
lied? I don't know.
All I know is, we should have just used ice trays and foregone the ice maker.
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