Feb 2, 2024 4 min read

They were not the kind of messages you like to receive in the middle of a busy work week. The electric company was reaching out to say there would be planned outages two days hence.

That was the first domino in a weeklong string of inconvenient, frustrating, expensive and finally, strange happenings.

One morning last week, the trucks arrived on my street, and out tumbled a half-dozen workers who kept an eye on a transformer box until it was time to turn off our power and repair it. The outage lasted about 20 minutes, during which I took the dog for a walk. I returned to blinking clock lights; I reset them and got back to work at my desk.

I must not have been thirsty, bored or itchy for a snack all day because when I finally opened the fridge at 11 that night, there was no cold air, and things were getting smelly in there. The groceries I’d laid in the day before (so many bags of frozen blueberries! frozen salmon!) had gone soft and warm. Slippers on my feet and a flashlight in my hand, I went out to the garage to check the breaker box. Nothing happened, and the fridge lights were still on.

I suspected the outage was followed by a power surge that messed with the fridge. I once repaired an air cleaner by following a YouTube tutorial (deeply satisfying, that was), and so I looked around for some internet advice about resetting an old GE fridge. Best I could tell, a power surge had fried the motherboard. I watched the YouTube lessons closely, taking notes about removing panels and rewiring circuits. I was delusional enough to think I could figure this out. I’d have been more reliable removing my own appendix.

Using my superhuman strength, I pulled the fridge away from the wall and unplugged it, and approached the back panel with a flashlight and screwdriver. Saw the tangle of wires, put the panel back on, and called a repair person.

“The control board is dead,” he said, probably the result of a power surge. He ordered a new part. “About a week.”

I gathered what food had survived, put it in a box and set it outside on the patio. I woke the next day to find that temperatures were a balmy 60 degrees overnight. In January. The blueberries and salmon were toast.

There are people on this planet who were having a much worse day than I was. I reminded myself of that, and went online to order a small, backup fridge for the garage. It arrived in a huge, heavy box. I walked it into the garage, stripped off the cardboard and plugged it in. I’d been without cold storage for two days, but now I had a place for eggs and milk and maybe an ice pack for the headache this was causing.

And then, something happened that was so weird I still can’t explain it. On day three of the ordeal, I heard a humming in the kitchen. The little red light on the fridge control panel was on. I opened the freezer door and felt a cloud of cold air.

My fridge had decided to wake itself up. Maybe another surge came and reset everything. Maybe the fridge just grew tired of pouting. Whatever the reason, it’s been running fine since.

But I still don’t trust it. The fridge is cold but empty. This morning, I walked out to the garage to my little backup fridge to get the creamer for my coffee. It was still cold.