Delivery madness

As some of you know, we bought new appliances that we scheduled to be delivered on the day after Thanksgiving. Marcos realized that he would not be able to install the stove himself because the previous owners painted over the gas shut off valve. Rather than risk an unnecessary explosion, we paid a lot of money to have Sears send someone over to install the stove.

The delivery people were scheduled for very early in the morning on Friday and were on time. The installer also arrived at the same time, turned off the gas, cut the pipe, and then left. The delivery people, however, refused to haul away the old stove because it had a whole other appendage on the back and they didn't think it would fit down the stairs. Why they couldn't take off that back piece is beyond me. They did take away the fridge. Of course, I had to meet the old landlord to turn over keys and everything, so Marcos was dealing with this by himself.

Apparently the delivery people were supposed to set up the fridge (like put the arms on) but they didn't. So Marcos did all of that. I called the supervisor to complain and told him to send those guys back to pick up the stove.

It took a couple of phone calls to get the installers to come back. They also refused to take the back piece off of the old stove. Again, it was screwed in so I wasn't sure what the big deal was. But the bigger problem was that they wanted to charge us $45 for the flexi-pipe to attach the stove to the gas pipe. This is on top of the $235 we'd already paid for the installation. I spent almost an hour on the phone with Sears arguing about this and finally they agreed to pay for the pipe themselves. The installers tried to leave and Marcos told him that if they did, he would tell Sears that they refused to do the job. He told the same thing to their boss. After all of this fighting, the stove was installed. I still had to buy an appliance extension cord since the power cord did not reach the outlet. While I was at the local hardware store, I learned that a flexi-pipe for a gas stove costs about $15.

Marcos unscrewed the appendage on the back of the stove and the delivery guys finally came back to pick it up. They put a small gash in the stairwell wall for good measure. Although we can't really fault them that much for it. The stove must have weighed a half ton at least. The whole thing was made out of heavy steel. And we want to re-do the walls anyway.

Without further delay, here are our new appliances:


For all that trouble, I will admit that it is very nice to have new appliances. I can actually see what is in the crispers and the wine bottles fit much better. And we both love the new stove. You can control the heat so well and we have a storage drawer at the bottom. Our inaugural dinner was our favorite dish: pasta puttanesca.