So is the Life

After leaving for the Army I have lived in almost every possible living situation you could. I have lived in barracks, an apartment in Korea where the landlord didn't speak a lick of English and the only Korean I knew was slang or enough to get me home in taxi, an apartment, rented a house, owned a house, and have been living in on post housing our last duty station and this, our most recent assignment.

 

Each living situation has had it's ups and downs and have taught me a lot more about housing than I thought I would ever want to know. The biggest lesson teacher was when we bought our first house.

Man that sucker was awesome!!! It came with two wall mounted flat screens, a projector with built in surround sound, and a decked out kitchen. It was huge for the price we paid but as with most things, you get what you pay for. First summer in the house, the AC went out. The first winter, you guessed it, the heat went out. Every summer and winter we owned it, there was something wrong with our unit. Luckily we had a home warranty that took care of most of the costs but that didn't cover the time off of work or sweltering/freezing days/nights. The house had other minor issues that we had to take care of before we sold it but the one that was just as nagging as the HVAC unit was the damn ice machine. Needless to say I learned more than I wanted about refrigerators as well.

Fast forward to this past weekend. Friday night and I went to get some ice for a glass of water, or maybe it was a vodka and cranberry, whatever, and I noticed the ice bin wasn't full. We don't use a lot of ice so it was kind of suspect that it wasn't full. I also noticed that it seemed like it wasn't as cold as it should have been in there so I checked some of the items. Yup, some of the stuff had thawed out. I accused our oldest of not shutting the door completely. I didn't raise hell because we didn't lose too much stuff but I reminded her of the importance of making sure the door was shut. Luckily we have a deep freezer so we moved the stuff into it until it got back to the right temperature.

Saturday morning I woke up abnormally early and went to get something out of the fridge and something didn't seem right. Sure enough, the relay had gone bad (was making a ticking noise when it was running) so I called in an emergency work order. Of course this would happen the day of the "great blizzard of 2017" and the service man mentioned it may be a while before he got to us. Being the understanding man that I am (not), I said just be safe.

Within a couple of hours he showed up, looked at it, and said it was the relay. He went on to say that he was going to have to find a new relay or a new refrigerator but either way he would be back to fix or replace. Later in the afternoon he showed up and replaced the bad relay. He said all would be well and went about his business.

I woke up Sunday expecting there to be ice and wouldn't ya know it, no damn ice. I placed a work order and just knew it would be 6 day (the max per our housing site) before someone would get there to fix it. One thing I'm good at is admitting I'm wrong, I've had a lot of practice. Wouldn't you know it, yesterday afternoon someone showed up to fix the ice machine. Not an hour after he left I noticed the fridge was making all kinds of weird noises so I called in another emergency work order telling them what happened. They called back and asked me to diagnose it, it was after 5PM, so I did and he thought it was just in defrost mode. I politely disagreed and told him that it wasn't cooling at all. He assured me someone was on the way so I said OK. 

No more than a few minutes later when I went to check I noticed it wasn't running at all. I tried to call the gentleman back to let him know that it was probably a bigger problem than what he was anticipating and that I was probably going to need a new fridge. He swore it was just defrosting but assured me someone was coming to check it out. About an hour later he shows up, pulls the fridge from the wall, tests the outlet, and tells me that the breaker was popped. He reset it and came back and looked over the fridge and says, "Well, I'm going to tell them (base housing) that you need a new unit. Whoever changed the relay put the wrong kind on and should have suggested the same." Insert my "I told you face" at this point.

So here they are a couple of hours ago swapping out the old for the new. Nothing about the work order went how I would have expected but does anything when it is related to the military? Fortunately for us we had minimal losses. It has been cold enough at night and we could just put our perishables out in the freezing garage and the frozen stuff in the deep freezer. Luckily we also have a backup plan with renter's insurance. Any major losses and our company would have reimbursed us a pretty penny for our losses and trouble. I never want to rely on insurance but it is nice knowing we could have fallen back on them had I not woke up early Saturday.

So is the life of living in military housing. I'm sure not all housing companies are the same and they will all have their ups and downs. Right now we don't have much of a choice but to live here and hope nothing else breaks. LOL 

Have you ever had any experiences like that? And for the record, remember I said I'm good at admitting when I was wrong, I apologized to our daughter for accusing her of leaving the door open. LOL