Tag: freezer

Posted in Life

A little dent and a big discount

Posted on by William Douthwaite

The delivery guys with our new garage freezer arrived ahead of schedule. I didn’t have to spend my day waiting through the four-hour delivery window.

I watched as they lowered it to the ground and unboxed it. One of them called me out of the garage and said, “I need to show you this.” He showed me a small dent on the edge of the door, about knee height. He said, “You have two options. You can send it back to the warehouse. Or you can accept it and I will call in to see if there’s a discount.”

I called my wife out to take a look. If we sent it back, who knows how long we’d have to wait for a new one to be delivered? It took three weeks to get this one. We decided to keep it, especially it was just cosmetic and it was, after all, for the garage.

The delivery guy immediately called someone who answered, “Save the sale.” He gave her the information, and she replied, “We can give you $165 off the price.” I didn’t expect that much, so I said, “Sounds good. We’ll take it.” So we got a twenty-five percent discount for a little dent that I haven’t even thought about until now.

The freezer was packed in a styrofoam padded box, so who knows when or how it got damaged? I’m sure the company didn’t want it back, so this was a win for everyone.

Posted in church, Grace, Rant

Keep your stuff. Please.

Posted on by William Douthwaite

0006294200035_00It must have been the creaking sound that got my attention. What is that noise? It seemed to be coming from the freezer in the church kitchen. Freezers don’t usually make a lot of noise. Unless someone is trapped in there. Overly cautious, I slowly opened the door and peeked inside.

Perched on the top shelf is a three-gallon bucket of maple walnut ice cream with no lid. It was surrounded by several bags of ice that had been permanently joined together in a moment of melting. Their combined weight strained the top shelf like a bar on the back of a weightlifter squatting who-knows-how-many pounds.squat

But that’s not all. On the shelves beneath were ancient hot dog buns, vintage popsicles, and something orange left over from what I am sure was a fabulous supper. Nice. By the grace of God, it was all disposed of before the health department caught wind of the situation.

There is, as everyone knows, an unwritten rule that anything you don’t want or need — animal, vegetable or mineral — may be dropped off at the church. Common items include books (including many, many bibles), old computers, printers and monitors (working or non-working), TVs, walkers, crutches and commodes, out-dated food, pianos and electric keyboards, broken toys and dried up pens and markers.

To this collection we add other items unintentionally left at church: umbrellas, jewelry, keys (how did you drive home?), clothing (did you go home naked?), water bottles, sweaters and sweatshirts, and every imaginable variety of Tupperware.

I appreciate you thinking of us. But I need to tell you: we just reduced the size of our dumpster. So we don’t have the same disposal capacity we used to. I apologize for the inconvenience, but you might just have to put your stuff out on the curb yourself.