The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Our stove lost a burner awhile back and although usually I would try to fix it myself, I decided the old girl wasn’t worth even the cost of a replacement burner. So when the oven started overheating by 75 degrees at 350, burning whatever we baked, I guess I could’ve replaced the gizmo that substitutes as a thermostat but isn’t a thermostat, another 50 buck item, about 40 bucks more than the stove is worth. A house call by an appliance repairman has always been out of the question, the closest one being about 50 dollars away. Once I tore down a clothes dryer right on the sidewalk outside the appliance dealer’s shop in downtown Mt. Vernon. When I couldn’t figure out how to install a newly purchased used part, Tim the Repairman came out and mentored me. Figured, I guess, anyone this desperate or poverty stricken or stupid, probably needed compassion and help both.

One of my bandmates, Monika, said she was purchasing a gas range and I could have her fairly new electric one for free. I offered to pay her, but she insisted. So yesterday I borrowed a dolly from a neighbor and drove over to pick up my almost new Frigidaire ceramic top electric stove, happy as a dodo over my good fortune. Free is my favorite price.

So I got the stove on the dolly, strapped it in with not one, but two ropes, then headed for the truck. Monika’s porch was really narrow so I went to wheel it around and go down the steps, but I misjudged the edge, dropped one wheel over the step and … lost the stove down the stairs. It landed with a bang and the sick sound of glass breaking. The glass was the ceramic stovetop.

Of course I was pissed at myself. Of course I felt like the kid who broke his best Christmas toy taking it out of the package. Of course I loaded the wreckage into my truck and drove the ruined stove home. Of course I googled up replacement tops and yeah of course they were way expensive. Of course I googled used ones on E-bay and they were a fortune too. So of course I went straight to the dump and paid $22.50 to dispose of my now useless range.

I went to Craigslist looking for a cheap stove. Not free. But hopefully cheap. Found one, but never got an answer from the seller so after an hour or so I drove 40 miles north to the used appliance store, bought a stove for $275, drove it home, dragged it into the house, dragged the old one out, loaded it into my truck and headed for the dump. The nice lady in the booth said, “Didn’t you bring in a stove already today?” I said I had heard there was a two for one sale. She was having a bad day too so her sense of humor was greatly diminished. Before she could say $22.50, I handed her $22.50. “I guess you know where to drop it,” she muttered. I nodded sadly. You could probably guess that when I got home the cheap Craigslist stove seller had sent me an e-mail saying the thing was available and gave me directions to her place, a couple miles from where the used appliance place. This is what is called in common parlance, insult to injury.

We are now in possession of a pre-1999 white electric, no electronics, coil top stove with the old 3 prong cord that fits our 3 prong receptacle. Everything works well. By my reckoning our free stove only cost us $320 plus the price of gas. This is runaway inflation in anyone’s book. Free, like those patriots with the American flag flying ragged on their 4×4 trucks like to say, isn’t free.

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Back when I first came to Seattle and Gomorrah, I had a buddy who lived in a dive apartment that was going to be sold and remodeled. They were tossing the old 1940’s era refrigerators the junkies and alcoholics had used for decades and my pal asked me if I wanted to go in with him on the capitalist venture of hauling, cleaning and selling these vintage frigidaires for fun and profit. Not being employed and in full possession of a half ton Chevy pickup, I said sure. And by that afternoon we owned 60 reefers of various stages of mold and decomposition.

I had access to a garage none of my six roommates used, so we stored them there after a couple days lugging them down 2 or 3 flights of stairs near downtown, then hauling them up to the university district where I rented a room in a house full of students. Each one got cleaned, disinfected and plugged in to see if it still worked. They all did. Tough units, those old Kelvinators and Frigidaires. Not particularly efficient, but they’d run until the next century if you asked them to. All we asked them to was run for the 30 days we offered as a ‘quality assurance guarantee’. If we’d been savvier biznessmen, we would’ve offered a 2 year service plan like Sears. Course, Sears is in about the same shape today as some of those refrigerators were back then.

Our ‘advertising’ campaign was simple in those pre-Craigslist times — we put flyers on telephone poles.
$30 30 DAY GUARANTEE FREE DELIVERY CALL THIS #
The Freon filled appliances sold like hotcakes, mostly to little bistros and coffee shops and student renters and our friends. I kept one for my room after my roommates started stealing my beer and food from the communal fridge. Then I locked my room. I guess they were young communists, share and share alike, mine is theirs. They weren’t bad people, but I learned why communism doesn’t work unless the others do and you don’t.

By the end of a month we’d sold every last unit. We made about $800 dollars each, more than I made the entire previous year, maybe two. My buddy said maybe we should’ve grabbed the stoves too, but by then it was too late and our experimental entrepreneurism came to an abrupt end when demand outstripped product. Probably lucky for both us Appliance Kings.

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