Back in 1859, when Italy was convulsed in a noisy departure from the Austrian Empire, a young man came up with the idea of creating an ‘ice and beer factory’ in the Venetian town of Udine to provide alcohol for whichever soldiers happened to be creating mayhem in the area at the time. His name was Luigi Moretti and 140 years later, his grateful descendants flogged it to Heineken for a tidy fortune.
Last week, two of its canned products, which had been sitting in our fridge for some time, were taken out, and placed on top of it overnight to make room for something large that needed keeping chilled.
In hindsight, it was a monumentally crap idea, up there with the Prime Minister’s one about letting the Cheltenham Festival plough on in the early stages of a pandemic.
The victim was not to have known that he, or she, had put it on a pad that houses the control box for the whole ridiculous gadget. Or that one of the cans had a microscopic hole in its bottom that only opened up when subject to heat, which the control pad duly provided. What we now know is that 330 ml of beer and the inside a computerized control box are not happy bedfellows.
By the morning, the fridge was making a noise an old time ocean liner that is trying to go faster than its engine was designed to, and by eleven o’clock, it was belching out enough smoke for people in the village to assume that we had just elected a new pope. By lunchtime, it just made an agonized kind of fart noise, and died. Yup, our first world, eight year old, middle class, extravagant, look-at-us-we’ve-got-an-appliance-that-can-shoot-down-aircraft fridge, rolled over and lost the will to go on.
Like a long-neglected filing cabinet, the stuff that we used on a daily basis made up only a tiny proportion of the contents. When we started to clear it out into kind neighbours’ fridges, we discovered things like wilted lettuce, 12 year old jars of Cumberland sauce from which we could have re-invented penicillin, and frozen lumps of meat that answered to the physiology of no recognisable animal.
Our problems, as it turned out, were only just starting. The notion that you can just ring up someone in one of those ‘customer-focused’ chains, find out what they have in stock and buy it is one for the birds. For a start, they very deliberately set up a phone system that denies you the opportunity of speaking to a member of staff in the local store. So you speak to someone in Corby, or Rangoon, who says that, whilst he would like to help, he can’t. ‘You can go on pointing at the ‘in stock’ motif all you like, Sir; it is not in stock until the store says it is.’ ‘And will they?’. ‘No, sir, I am not authorized to talk to them’. Then, when they finally admit that they have got it in stock, they are adamant that you cannot come to the store and collect it. ‘That is not one of our collectable appliances,’ they say, as if you are trying to buy a bloody Meissen figurine. And when you ask if they do have any ‘collectable’ fridges, they concede that they don’t. ‘Not tonight, sir.’ Not while I breathe.
It turns out that the never-knowingly-undersold retailer, sustainer of Middle England and creator of whimsical, weepy Christmas adverts of sad looking dogs pissing around on trampolines, has lost count of how few tosses it gives about your custom, when the chips are really down.
There is no quick, durable explanation to a friend that you have just called at six in the evening and asked if they have a spare fridge. But we did it. We called round people we loved, liked, tolerated and barely knew until the nicest people in the world said ‘yes, we’ve got one you can have’ for the two weeks that it was going to take someone to mine the ore and extrude the plastic that would eventually go into creating our new one.
The moral of the story, apart from the ones about fridge vanity and putting beer where it doesn’t want to be, is a straightforward one. The independent appliance shop in Midhurst sent someone round straight away to declare the old one dead, helped with our insurance claim, found us another one, came round a week later to fit it, plumb it in and take the old one away, without ever once making us feel like pond life.
Shop local, whilst you still can.
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