Is Your Refrigerator Running?

Because ours certainly isn't. For the second time in about year, I've managed to break our little refrigerator. I celebrated Obama's inauguration late Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, planning well enough in advance that I was able to take the day off on Wednesday. After seeing Shanti off to work, I watched the Obama's hop from inaugural ball to inaugural ball and perused newspapers and blogs for insights into what was a truly historic day.

By late morning, I was feeling a bit lazy. Wanting to be productive without overexerting myself, I decided to take on our refrigerator in what has become a fairly routine ritual. We have a small and cheap fridge that doesn't have a separate door to the freezer. In order to access the freezer we must first open the main door and then open a shoddy plastic door. It is only then that we find ourself in the minuscule freezer, better known to us as the "ice cave" for its ability to transform itself into what must be the fastest growing glacier in the world. The result is that the already tiny freezer gets smaller and smaller as the ice expands. Unchecked on a regular basis, we would be totally without a freezer.

And it had been a while since I last did some work on our ice cave. As I do perhaps every other month, I took a hammer and a chisel to it and slowly started to chip away at the ice, as thick as three or four inches in some places. Just as I was finishing, I placed an ill-advised strike. A faint but audible hissing commenced and was soon followed by a rather queer smell. Had I not faced a similar situation about a year ago, I may have panicked and somehow tried to find access to some sort of Cambodian poison control (probably better known as a medivac). However, since I was already an expert in causing refrigerator damage, I simply tried to patch the hole with a variety of insufficient patches (duct tape, electrical tape, poster tacky, super glue, etc). Failing miserably, I informed the family downstairs and they called for repairmen, shaking their heads at the stupid barang all the while. Let's just hope that two times is the charm for me to actually learn my lesson...