Tuesday, April 17, 2007

how embarrassing

I just paid a repairman $60 to plug in my stove. I feel like an incredible idiot. But given the situation I can't see how I could have known. This is what happened:

DH makes cookies at 3pm on Sunday. Oven is working just fine. At 5pm I set it to preheat, but it only reaches 135 (so it *was* working) and then cuts out. The burners don't work either. However the digital clock display and the timer work just fine. So obviously something to do with heating has broken on it. It's an 11 year old stove & we've had to replace the heating coil once already. Monday I call a repair place, tell them the problem. They say something about circuit boards. So they aren't thinking about it either. Repair shops, unlike tech support, do not ask "Is the appliance plugged in?" before proceeding to troubleshoot. Even if they had I would have said "well sure it is" without looking because it's STOVE not a printer & the odds of it somehow coming unplugged without a noticeable amount of deliberate effort on my part, are really quite slim. The plug is behind the stove, you have to move it out of the way and pretty much CLIMB OVER IT to unplug it. And I am not the sort of fanatical cleaner who insists on moving appliances to clean behind them on a regular basis. Once a year, maybe. So it has been MONTHS since that stove was moved, maybe even a year or more. And the stove WAS WORKING all this time. Seriously, would 'maybe the plug came loose' have occurred to you given the situation?

The guy comes here, moves the stove, says "the plug is loose" pushes it all the way in and the stove works fine. he checked out the circuit board and other electronics to be sure but as it says on the receipt "Plugged stove in" is what he did.

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