A Strongly Worded Letter to My Refrigerator Manufacturer

Foreword

One of life’s greatest conveniences is the ability to preserve pre-purchased food long enough to avoid the use of penicillin after every meal. It is a luxury that appliance makers would remind you should be reserved for the select. If you are not willing or able to fill their coffers in exchange for their elite product, you have to accept a life of molded turkey breast, or the grueling trip to a fresh market as a daily task of life.

Let us all marvel in their genius ability to bend all manner of technology and physical science, and behold the glorious splendor of … a cold box! Take a moment to appreciate and rank it amongst the highest human achievements it so rightly deserves! Rush to move finances, with all vehicles at your disposal, for the privilege and status of this device. A device that is in NO WAY a basic, or common, appliance in nearly every home!

Oh, how life will be forever changed for generations of your family by recycled margarine containers cryogenically preserving the mystery of last weeks meals. Unsuspecting relatives will clammer with joy to discover their contents despite expecting to find a muffin spread. It will become a lasting memory of pure happiness brought to you by the amazing humans behind this Herculean achievement.

With all of the brainpower, capital resources, and pure human might, that must’ve gone in to such a bell weather moment in modern history, should we accept a certain amount of flaws and occasions where it may not live up to its illustrious billing? Have I become such a glutton for the lavish that I expect too much out of these devices? Perhaps you can be a judge of that notion? All that lead-up aside, I would like to present an open letter to my refrigerator about just a few “opportunities for improvement” …

To Whom It May Concern,

Your product is trash! Inexplicably, your company has somehow developed an appliance priced, in the THOUSANDS of US Simoleons, congruent to the volume of airspace contained within it. Bravo for that, BRAVO! And, if I am being honest, you somewhat remarkably achieve the basic competency of a refrigerator. I don’t plan to argue that part of it much. But everything else that you have bolted on is “best in class” failure. And you are not alone. It would appear as though your company and it’s direct competitors are engaged in a chess match of ineptitude, publicly played out in kitchens across America, with the funds of us hard-working common folk.

When I wander back to the days of my youth, my mind’s eye can vividly picture the great familial gathering point of our kitchen. Perhaps its so vivid because of the unapologetically 70’s-era appointments despite this being the early 90’s. But also so vivid due to one particular refrigerator that continually enters the frame. Because … IT WAS THE ONLY REFRIGERATOR WE EVER HAD! It had 2 doors split directly down the middle. One side was cold, the other side was colder, and it had a few basic organizational panels. That was it, it was brilliant, and it worked just like god intended. My father plugged it in once and it stood there, as a monument to reliability, for three decades without us ever looking at that plug again.

Could your industry not accept such an accomplishment? It was a perfect, simple, effective, appliance that you could have left untouched while you continued to wipe your noses with (inflation-adjusted) dollars year in and year out. Instead, you created teams of “Research and Development Muppets™” to bungle the implementation of a bunch features, of arguable utility, to justify their continued existence. That was a terrible idea!

Failed Idea 1: The ice maker

This idea makes a ton of sense. We charlatans like our drinks cold, we have your “cold box,” why not marry the two and give us ice at our disposal? Except you suck at it! You need water to produce the ice, so that meant we needed to outfit our homes with a water line in the giant crevasse we reserve for the footprint of your device. You decided we need it to be mechanically delivered to us via the door, and that 100% of the time we need the option to select between the “perfect choking hazard”, and “frozen razor shards” for the shape. All total, it likely quadrupled the amount of parts that will fail are required.

I must confess that not all of this heat need be directed at YOUR company. As I mentioned above, some credit(?) is deserved for your competitors. That’s because your product is the SECOND refrigerator we have purchased in a 5 year span, with the first coming from a partner in the quest to achieve maximum nonfeasance.

This partner had a particular penchant for negligence in the ice maker department. Of which, our refrigerator was a top victim, naturally. The entire mechanism would frost over and bind to the point of malfunction. Our options were quite clear. We could defrost the entire refrigerator, discarding its contents during the half-day routine. We could hire a repair technician to extort a repair bill for the same routine. Or we could stand there with a butter knife and a hair dryer for the semi-monthly ritual of defrosting our ice maker. One might think there would at least be an option to replace the defective ice maker with an updated, less-terrible, model. One would be wrong. Your competitor, in all bewilderment, managed to acknowledge and accept the failure of their design, and agree to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about it:

For its part, Samsung has reportedly done nothing to help, failing to issue a recall or offer to repair or replace consumers’ refrigerators. The company did, however, issue a service bulletin all the way back in July 2015 … expanding on the problems described by many consumers.
source: classaction.org

This issue started around 2015 and has since been legally volleyed for nearly a decade by the sly tactics of your competitor’s legal department. Your company should do a case study on this level of fraudulence. During this time frame, victims were left to continually repair their machines at their own cost, a practice we simply decided to punt on in favor of YOUR machine. Which, for the most part, has an ice maker that hasn’t failed as miserably. But fret not, because the natural copilot to the ice-maker is up next and your failures in that design are quite perceptible.

Failed Idea 2: The water dispenser

This seems like a classic case of offering something we don’t really need, and charging for it, because you got us to agree to the thing we sort-of needed. We all retro-fitted our kitchens with dedicated water lines near our refrigerator. We updated building codes to include provisions for them. Now we can have the indulgence of filling our water cup not from the other dedicated water line (the sink), but from the one you had routed to our refrigerator. And since you smashed a hole in the door to make way for the ice dispenser mechanism, we can do it without the hazard of opening the door. You even created the industry of disposable filters to rid us of a marginal amount of contaminants in our water cups. But if you need to fill a pot, you are left to your own filtration devices.

Should I be thanking you? I mean, maybe if the mechanism to trigger it worked in ANY predictable way. I naturally thought the little flappy thing (technically accurate definition) would be the key to the whole operation. I seem to push my cup into it, and the water begins to flow. I guess flappy is only concerned with enabling the water flow, disabling the water flow is an entirely different department? When flappy returns to the default position, the water flow continues for a seemingly random period of time. Of which I must accurately predict the corresponding volume of water that will be dispensed, during said time, as to leave enough of an overflow buffer in my cup. After numerous failed attempts at that game of skill sheer luck, I tried to force the parameters to give me a better chance at accuracy. Perhaps if I pulled flappy back towards me, it would introduce enough force to disengage the flow mechanism from whatever was preventing that before. No such luck. There is a brief section of flappy’s range of motion where the water flow is disengaged, but that is immediately followed by another “opening of the flood gates” … pun intended.

The only method I have found to dispense water, accurate to even the pint, is to use a feature you created called Bottle Fill™. Which, while it massively undershoots its namesake function, at least allows me to bypass flappy and its potluck mechanisms. One cycle on Bottle Fill™ usually fills any CUP in our house to an acceptable level. If we do have a bottle to fill, it’s usually 1.5-2.5 Bottle Fill™ cycles. So introduces another game of skill. In order to dispense 0.5 Bottle Fill™ cycles worth of water I must hit the button a second time to stop from a full cycle. This is a MASSIVELY more predictable game than flappy, yet a comical example of how I must parry your attempts to transfer your failures onto my water proof resistant laminate floor.

Failed Idea 3: Counter depth

The precedence you have set with the aforementioned failures somewhat sadly trivializes this doozy. But this might be the best of the worst! As American consumption had grown, so too did the volume of chilled air you provided. We clamored for more space to store Papa John’s™ boxes and exotic fruits we heard about on the internet. Then came a problem. Armed with useless features you began to grow past your designated area, poking your belly out in proportion with the bellies your contents cultivated. Aesthetically, we didn’t like it and apparently we let you know.

Your solution was not to trim out the unnecessary features, or engineer them to take up less space. You simply reduced the overall foot print of your device, along with its volume, and created “counter depth” refrigerators. If we were concerned with the aesthetics of your stainless food coffin, we must opt not to increase width or height, but to DECREASE depth. And guess what … YOU CHARGE US MORE FOR IT!!! We challenged you, you immediately gave up, and then you slapped us in the face and told us that’s what we wanted all along. I at least had the decency to cry like a man as I knowingly paid into this master class of fraud. I can’t suspect that you found yourselves clever for this, but simply hated your customers so much that you proceeded anyway.

So now I have my second premium-priced counter-depth cold box complete with one non-functioning ice maker, and the other a malfunctioning water dispenser. Both of which have enough freezer space for a bag of peas and a pint of ice cream.

TITOWMB: Ice cream

Speaking of ice cream, I’d like to take a tangent for a second and introduce a segment I call Things I Think of With My Brain. Mostly I think of things with a different body part located more near my backside, but occasionally my brain will do the thinking and produce a random nugget that I’d like to share with you all.

Failed Idea 4: Customizable organization

Allowing us to configure the airspace in your chamber of chill was a piss-poor compromise to reducing the overall volume while increasing the profit margin. But there was still a chance that you would have delighted to withhold even THAT from us. So, I guess a piss-poor compromise is still a compromise 🤷🏻‍♂️. At least we could calculate the most efficient ratio of shelves and compartments to the size and shape of our grocery.

Of all the cheap plastic crap that I have encountered (I have two boys under the age of 5, I’ve seem some crap), I’m not sure I have come across less quality set of accessories than what you have spec’d. What system of “in the area” tolerances does your manufacturing division operate under? Its almost as if the design for the shelf slots was performed thousands of miles away from the design for the shelves themselves. Were both engineers forced to use an ancient cipher, delivered by bicycle courier, to encode their measurements?

Arranging you EasySelect™ shelving system generated an audible account of my struggle best compared to two pieces of Styrofoam Greco-Roman wrestling. You offered a wide range of options that included only tall enough for can of tuna, to not tall enough for a gallon of milk. If you have a 2-liter bottle of soda, you basically give the entire left-half to it. The shape of the freezer tub, for no discernable reason, is “excavator bucket” with a central divider just in case you are worried about a box of frozen waffles somehow contaminating the box of frozen pancakes.

There is also the added convenience of tempered glass shelves, in case you need to poke your head entirely into the machine, but still want to see the box of baking soda in the bottom corner. Tempered glass was a nice finish, but of course you attached it to plastic shelf connectors with a wall thickness measured in microns. Parts of the glass shelves slide into and out of themselves for some reason. But the trick to executing that maneuver requires the body control of a pop-n-lock dancer. All of it is just pure hot cold garbage!

In summation

We are entering the holiday season with Thanksgiving this week, a time of great stress for our refrigerators. As you sit with your families at your mahogany tables milled from the currency of your customers, I hope you make peace with your part in this comedy tragedy. Meanwhile I will be searching through one of our two refrigerators, and a chest freezer, to put all of the leftover pie. Afterwards, I’ll sip down a cool glass of water, letting the ice shards slice my esophagus along the way. Then I’ll finish the night by mopping up my kitchen floor from the pools of water in front of your lousy product.