The Question I Never Thought to Ask Before Buying a Fridge

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Until recently, I genuinely believed buying a refrigerator was one of the easiest household jobs.

It keeps food cold.

You choose one.

You pay.

You go home.

Simple.

Apparently, I had underestimated the process.

Nobody tells you people have checklists.

I discovered this after my refrigerator gave up on me for the third time in five months.

By this stage, our relationship was becoming exhausting.

Fresh vegetables were surviving on optimism, milk had become a daily gamble and leftovers were developing trust issues. Oddly enough, the freezer continued doing an excellent job. The ice cream remained perfectly frozen.

Clearly, the appliance had priorities.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was my no-shopping month. A month dedicated to discipline, budgeting and repeatedly reminding myself that I already owned enough clothes, shoes and handbags to survive perfectly well.

Unfortunately, refrigerators don’t respect personal financial goals. Once they stop refrigerating, they become surprisingly difficult to ignore.

So, there was only one thing to do.

I told my husband we needed a new refrigerator.

Half an hour later, we were standing in an appliance store.

That’s when I realised buying a refrigerator is apparently a serious business.

The salesperson began explaining features I didn’t even know refrigerators had.

I kept nodding.

It seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

Meanwhile, my husband appeared to be running a completely different inspection.

He walked from one refrigerator to another, opening the door, looking inside for a few seconds, then quietly closing it again. He repeated this so many times that I assumed he was conducting some sort of highly scientific comparison.

Eventually, I walked over.

“So… what are you looking for?”

“I’ve got one question,” he said.

Finally.

Someone else was contributing to the purchase.

He called the salesperson over.

“Can I fit a big cooking pan in this one?”

The salesperson paused.

I paused.

For a brief moment, all three of us seemed to be standing in completely different conversations.

Then, without showing the slightest sign of surprise, the salesperson adjusted one of the shelves.

“Yes,” he said. “A large pan will fit.”

The demonstration continued.

Mine didn’t.

On the drive home, I couldn’t hold my curiosity any longer.

“Why was fitting a cooking pan the first thing you wanted to know?”

“I don’t want to transfer leftovers into containers. I just want to put the whole pan in the fridge,” he said.

For a second, I just looked at him.

There I was comparing every feature the salesperson mentioned.

My husband ignored all of them. He’d arrived with his own checklist.

It had exactly one question.

Will the pan fit?

Somehow, he’d prepared better for buying a refrigerator than I had.

Thanks for reading.

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When I’m not writing about everyday life, I’m writing romance novels. Read the first chapters for free at AuthorNehaSingla.com.