Tuesday, June 03, 2008

My Stove Works!
We discovered that the oven was broken the first Friday we were in residence here when we tried to bake a frozen pizza for dinner. Yeah, the oven wouldn't come on. I was OK with only one burner on the stovetop working, I've lived with one you had to light with a match every time... But I just cannot live without an oven.
So Keith called the Home Warranty company, and they put us in touch with A1 Appliance repair. The guy asked us a few questions about our oven over the phone, got the serial numbers, and then called us back in a couple of days with the news that he couldn't get replacement parts for it, and not to worry, we should just send him $85 and the insurance company would send us a check to buy a new oven (our deductible is, apparently, $85, a fact he knew well since he is the ONLY repairman in our area the company deals with - and he operates out of Pennsylvania). Keith didn't want to send him $85 for nothing, so he questioned "Why am I paying you $85 again? Are you going to come look at the oven?" and the guy got pissed and demanded we send him the money then hung up on Keith.
Keith called the Home Warranty company back and asked if this was common practice, for a repairman to just take $85 without even looking at the oven and filing paperwork saying it was totaled. The girl on the other end of the phone call said she didn't know, but it would take at least a week to get another person out to look at our oven. Keith said "no one came to look at our oven." I don't think the girl understood what was going on, but anyway she convinced Keith to call the Jerk at A1 Appliance back and have him send us his bill. So we did.
This guy would have gotten our $85, and charged the Home Warranty a hundred bucks for a service call he didn't make PLUS $120 for travel expenses to Morgantown. Um, I'm not a lawyer or anything, but I think that is FRAUD. So Keith called the Home Warranty company again, told them what was going on with this criminal jerk from A1 Appliance, and guess what? THEY DIDN'T CARE! They didn't want a copy of the invoice, they didn't want to hear my husband warning them that this crook was making $300 a pop off of them while sitting in his living room. They were kind of annoyed that they had to locate another certified appliance repairman (and it took 2 more weeks and several more phone calls from us to get him here).
But the nice man from City Appliance came today and FIXED my oven, in less than half an hour, with - I am not shitting you here - Dental Floss, a Paper Clip, a Wet Paper Towel, and a Straight Pin. FIXED. In 25 Minutes. And he didn't even charge us the whole $85!!!

So now my oven works, who's coming over for pizza?

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