Welcome to the family!

It is with great joy that I announce an addition to our family – at 100 lb (that’s a wild guess) and 24″ wide, our new dishwasher was introduced into our household yesterday.

It was a long labor, waiting for it to arrive, and yet we did manage to get it delivered without pain medication. Here’s our birth story:

For some reason, The Husband chose to order this appliance from a store that will remain nameless. (But here’s a clue –  long ago this store had an extra name attached to it – “and Roebucks Company.”) For the sake of anonymity I’ll give it a name completely at random. Let’s go with “Tears.”

See, 30 years ago we had a truly dreadful experience with Tears, and vowed never to purchase anything  from them again (well, except for Craftsman tools, which my handyman husband can’t live without). All those years ago we were setting up our first home, and we ordered a set of lamps from Tears. The lamps arrived, but so did a full set of living room furniture, which we had definitely NOT ordered. Sent it back, to lots of confusion – but we considered the matter closed. Until three years later, when we applied for a mortage to buy a house. And our credit report came back tanked…because Tears insisted we had skipped out on paying for a living room set we had never ordered in the first place.

So anyway, some form of insanity seized The Husband when he was shopping online last weekend for this much-needed addition to our household appliance family. He chose to order the model we’d settled on from – you guessed it – Tears!

We held our breath all week, waiting for disaster to strike. We knew we were to recieve a phone call and/or email Sunday evening to announce our delivery appointment for Monday. It wasn’t until 8:00 pm on Sunday that the emails started arriving.

Three delivery confirmation emails. None of them had the correct contact phone number (my cell, as I’d be the one accepting delivery), but instead all three listed our land line – which we disposed of four years ago, and which The Husband DEFINITELY did not not list when making the purchase.

Even more interestingly, one of the confirmation emails to our account was actually addressed not to either one of us, but to a woman named Elise Skoglund, who lives somewhere in Minnesota, and who also seems to have purchased a dishwasher recently.

At 9:00 The Husband was on the phone with Tears “customer service,” which was, of course, a person in a land thousands of miles away. Husband confirmed our name (NOT Elise Skoglund) and our address (NOT Minnesota), and then clearly recited to the service rep the phone number we wished to be contacted at in the morning prior to delivery. The Husband is hard of hearing and keeps his phone volume turned way up, so I could hear the rep reply, “Okay, let me read back to you the contact phone number we have for you…” And he proceeded to read back OUR NON-EXISTENT LAND LINE PHONE NUMBER.

So, as I say, I was not sanguine about the likelihood that we would actually see a new dishwasher in our house on Monday.

But – lo and behold – a delivery truck pulled up smack in the middle of the time window stated yesterday morning. And – oh, happy day – that truck contained the exact model we had ordered.

We are now the proud owners of a bouncing baby black dishwasher.

What a relief.

Thank goodness this addition to the family is from ‘Murrica. I’d be ashamed to have a furrin’ model. Sheesh!

Oooh, look! Pretty blue lights!

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