It Won't Take Too Long

When I'm not working under a tyrannical oppression (Tim Hortons), I moonlight at the local Sears doing deliveries. Main reason is because my older brother owns the place and he sometimes needs a hand. Plus there's less stress overall, and even bad deliveries are still better than obnoxious, bad customers at Timmy's.

This tale starts about a week ago. We (that being my brother and I) were supposed to drop off a stove and fridge at quarter two five in the evening. We were a bit late, but when we showed, house lights were out, no car in the driveway. Get things ready, and we wait. My brother calls the woman, gets her house number. We hear the phone ringing inside and nobody answering it. Of course. So, he calls back to Sears, asks an employee of his to get her work number to try that. Well, turns out the place she works at closes at four, so there shouldn't be any reason on why she isn't there. At ten after five, he calls it and we move on with the next delivery. When we returned to Sears, she called, asking why we weren't there. By this point, we're done for the evening and she has to reschedule.

Fast forward a week, and this bit starts to truly take shape.

Well, this time she is there. Now, in the previous week, I had accidentally dented the bottom of the fridge with the dolly. Completely unremarkable and wouldn't affect the units ability to cool things. Well, as we get the fridge off the van and my brother is pointing this out to the woman, she says that an employee says that we could switch the direction the door on the fridge opens, but with that comes an assembly fee. She'd forget about the dent (and any money that might have been taken off) in exchange for doing the door reversal. "Sure," my brother says, "no problem."

Get the fridge in through the front door, sliding it into the kitchen, which is at the front of the house. I'm thinking how this might be a fifteen, maybe twenty minute job. In and out. Even with the door reversal, shouldn't take too long. Well, inside the kitchen comes the first hiccup. "Uh," I say, "the fridge is too tall for the slot." I can hear my brother saying "what?" as he looks at the spot in question. The cupboards were too low by a half inch to get the fridge in. Oh, damn. Well, my brother has the bright idea of unscrewing the cabinet and pushing it up the wall an inch or so to make room for the taller unit. "Get the drill and socket set from the van," my brother says. Only as I'm about to head there I realize, and so does he, that we had forgotten those very tools back at the store. Damn. Got a screwdriver, though!

So, while my brother toils with a screwdriver, I call my dad up and ask him if he can't run to the store and pick up the tools for us. He says sure. We eventually get the drill, but in the meantime while we're waiting we pull the old fridge out and load it on the van, along with the old stove. Put the new stove in, which the woman is concerned about because she thinks it might not fit because the fridge didn't. Dad shows up with the drill, and things seem to be moving along again. Hurrah, cheers, drinks on the house and all that, right? Nope.

After unscrewing the cabinet, it's sticking in place due to paint, so we actually have to smash it out of place without damaging it. That was great. Slide it up the wall, hold in place while my brother screws it into the wall again. Slide the new fridge in. Now comes the fun part: the door reversal. There were more screws, clips, hooks and insertions to be made on this door in such a complicated manner I thought some military tactician had come out to say "surprise." The whole system was extremely and unnecessarily convoluted. I hoped that the engineer who designed the system was proud of himself. Just getting the door off, and the freezer door off, was a chore. Getting it back one wasn't as bad, but still.

The end result was a job that should have taken twenty minutes, max, take an hour and fifteen minutes. And yet, even for all that, it still doesn't come close to my worst delivery...