The Adventures of Andy and the Office Refrigerator

Where I work everybody takes a week to handle all the basic chores of the office. This usually includes taking out the trash, washing the used coffee cups, which by the way has happened 3 times since Monday. We don’t have that many people in our office, we don’t even have that many coffee mugs!

One little task I took upon myself was to clean out the office fridge. It’s one of those larger model college dorm refrigerators and usually just as full of beer. One problem with this particular model is that after a while, say ten minutes or so, the freezer part starts to ice over. If you don’t keep up with scraping off of ice, say every twenty minutes or so you get a block of ice in the upper part of the device.

Having once de-iced the refrigerator once before, and this being my week to clean I took it upon myself to once again free the freezer part of the fridge from ice and release that lean cuisine meal that’s been sitting there for months from it’s icy bondage.

Phase 1: Bring in a cooler and Ice to keep all the beer and other items cold

This happened flawlessly, however all the beer was gone when I got in this morning there was one. Which means that after the one I had yesterday afternoon everyone else in the office kept drinking! Nonetheless the other refrigerated contents needed to be put on ice.

After moving everything to the cooler and adding ice, it was time to thaw the fridge. This happened nicely as it was warm and there was some heat coming off the dishwasher as explained above.

It seems over time the upper hinge on the door has worked itself loose, and today with the door ajar long enough it finally wiggled loose.

This lead to a more thorough cleaning than I had intended since I had to take the refrigerator out into the hall where I had more room to try and reattach the door.

This turned up unsuccessful as the two bolt-like objects that make up the hinge of the fridge (hey, that rimes!) are spaced such that you can’t have them attached to the main part of it and still get the door on. You can’t have them both attached to either the door or the big part and still get the door on. This lead to Bryce asking what I was doing. To which I replied just loud enough for Bob (who seems too cheap to hire a cleaning service) “Just giving myself a chance to clean under the fridge”.

But what comes next is I need to find a wrench so I can take off the bottom hinge, attach the top hinge to the main unit and then slide the door on that and finally re-attach the bottom hinge.

This is all so we have a clean place to keep our beer.