How long can you live without a modern convenience?

Well, apparently, a long time. Today, finally, the repairmen are coming to fix our Viking fridge at the farm. You would think that Viking means awesome, special, high end, excellent. You’d be wrong. Viking means – we break down, we don’t do refrigerators well, and our other stuff isn’t that great either. And it also means that in January when the company was sold to Middleby Corp. that there would be delays and delays and no shipment of parts for as long as it takes any Viking customer to wish they had never set sights on a Viking appliance in their lives.

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In June (June 8^th, to be exact), we got out to the farm to find that the refrigerator/freezer had stopped completely. Finally got a repair person to come out 2 weeks later to look at it. And they said, ya… it doesn’t work, we need a part…. So they ordered parts – which never shipped never shipped never shipped. We had to finally call and ask WTF? Where is our part? And why haven’t you called?  Oh, sorry, ya, Viking sucks, and they won’t ship parts – some sort of buyout has created some problems there… We’ll let you know. So, they eventually let us know, they could fix our fridge on August 15^th. No biggie, just, what…., over 2 months without a fridge right through the heart of summer. Nice.

So today, the hubby is out there all day, trying to work from the farm, while not just one, but 2 repair people are fixing the fridge. The problem has something to do with the copper pipe that brings water into the fridge and how it gets cold and water condensates on it, and then it gets corroded and leaks out all the refrigerant. The guy just rolled his eyes, oh ya, this happens all the time with these….. blah blah blah. And it has to be 2 guys to come because they have to drag it out from the wall and there is soldering and whatnot, and we get the “opportunity” to pay some astronomical rate of like $900 bucks to have a working Viking fridge. Not awesome.

The upside? We have a really great appreciation for block ice from the olden days. For over 2 months, we’ve been going super old school, filling the freezer drawer with block ice to keep whatever little bits of food cold for the weekend. I wonder how much we’ve spent in block ice since June. I’m thinking about charging Viking for my pain and suffering.

Based on this experience: DON’T BUY VIKING APPLIANCES! We bought the farmhouse with them already installed, so this fix will be good until the warranty is out, and after that, anything but Viking. Once we started having problems with customer service and the parts, we did some searches on Google and found that it’s not just us. People around the country are even more fed up than we are. Viking, you have a lot of work to do to get people back on your side.