New fridge

Hiya
We had a fairly major power cut at the end of March and the fridge that came with the flat I bought just didn't come back on. So I've had to get a new one because "it would not have been economical" to source a new thermostat, which is what the engineer thought was wrong with it. I have a very good household insurance, and this fridge is covered, phew! I called them and everything was arranged: delivery of a new fridge with roughly the same measurements, including transport and installation.
When the fridge was delivered at just before 10 this morning, I entered yet another one of the steep learning curves I've been encountering over the past nearly twelve months here in Oban (am being specific because I'm not sure things work exactly the same way everywhere in Scotland -- it's a vast country, after all, at least to a Swiss): the two young men who brought the fridge were not willing to take away the old one. That was not on their notes. It never occurred to me that one should arrange for that sort of thing. In Switzerland, it has been the law for some time now that suppliers take back old appliances and make sure they are recycled and disposed of properly. Not so here, at least not yet, and Scotland may be lagging behind on EU standards!
I called the people who were in charge of organising the delivery etc. and they agreed to cover the cost of taking away the old fridge.
The young men set to work, only to discover that whoever installed the kitchen did not think ahead: the partitions between fridge and freezer go right up to the wall and do not allow for the plug to be threaded through to the sockets which are hidden away at the back of a small spare compartment that houses my waste bin and recycling bag. So the delivery men went away, quite rudely, in fact -- marching out without so much as a good-bye. I'd have given them a nice tip if they had waited just two more minutes for me to finish my phone conversation with their boss...
So here I am, in my tiny kitchen, with a new fridge standing in the middle of everything, the old fridge clean and empty, and its contents stowed away in the coolest, darkest place I could find for the time being, kept cool by a couple of ice-box cooler thingies under a thick towel. Oh, and I only have a fairly major translation job needing to be done by Monday, and minutes of a meeting to be written and sent out yesterday, so there's no stress whatsoever!
But I stayed cool, took a deep breath and obtained permission from the insurance people to hire a local joiner (that's what they call a carpenter here) to come and help me get this sorted. A neighbour knew just the man; the man didn't answer my call but called right back; I explained my predicament; he came out almost straight away.
Well, within half an hour or so, quickly enough for me not to have had time to clean the old freezer and the extremely dirty floor and walls -- I never did clean that bit after I moved in, dreading what I would find, and it was dire: heaps of tiny little pills, piles of dust, sticky stuff I have no inclination to define – yuck! It reminded me of a story my kitchen-building grandfather told us of contracting blood poisoning after working on an old kitchen unit that was so dirty he was tempted to wear rubber gloves just to put a screw in! The people who lived in this flat before I took over were pigs!
Oh, and did you know that the average kitchen contains a vastly greater proportion of nasty microbes than any bathroom? Makes you think, doesn't it... But I digress.
The joiner, a very friendly and capable young man I am more than happy to recommend, pulled out his power tools, gave them a whirl here and there, had those partitions out in no time, pencilled in the line where they needed cutting to accommodate the huge UK plugs, jigsawed them out, and even offered to clean up afterwards!
That would have been the end of that, but then that would have been too sweet. The lead on the new fridge did not reach the socket. Yes, I could perhaps have switched fridge and freezer, but that would have meant having the fridge further away from the action when cooking. Also, I had spent half an hour switching the hinge of the new fridge door from the right to the left so the door would no longer collide with the cooker next to it that has a nasty little ledge protruding out into the world.
So I cycled up to George Street to my favourite hardware store (neither the nearby Coop nor Tesco have a simple, one-metre-long three-wire extension with one simple plug and one simple floating -- if that's the expression -- socket. They have lots of fancy extensions with two, four or even six sockets; mind you, the hardware store didn't have that kind of extension either, but at least the man attending to my wishes offered to make one up for me.) As the man pulled out the ingredients, I remembered least ten metres of three-wire cable at home, but sans plug/socket. So I simply bought those, rushed home before the rain, and set to assembling the new extension. Just as well I used to do this sort of thing when I was a kid, under my father's watchful eye!
It wasn't actually difficult, just very fiddly, and – being a woman – my spatial brain is a bit small, so getting all the wires the right length and so on, was a bit tricky. But I did it.
It was about 4pm by the time the new fridge, now duly rested after its long and bumpy journey, began its new life in my kitchen. And there it stands, humming and gurgling away. It's very small and has a veggie compartment that can barely hold a carrot, but it will do.
The next thing will be to get rid of the old fridge, but that's another story...
And now I've got to get back to my work.
Cheerioh!