Ovenly Warmth

I thought that my timer was off, when many meals can out a little more cooked than was necessary. Okay, so they were burnt to a crisp on more than a dozen occasions. After buying an oven thermometer, I was enlightened. My timer was fine, my cooking abilities weren’t to be doubted – at least for this reason, anyway, and the oven was crap. No really – it was.

The temperature would routinely (though not always) run 100 degrees over what you set it for. The Idiot King told me that most ovens don’t heat to the exact temperature. It’s not an exact science, I was patronizingly told. I laughed at that and replied something like, “Well, baking is an exact science. I cannot imagine that your main implement to bake with would be unable to accomplish the task at hand." Or, more likely, I just laughed in his face and asked him to fix it. Yeah, that sounds more like me.

I was told by the ever-tardy Idiot that he’d be back “middle of next week, I’m pretty sure” with the part to fix it. On Friday of that week, my husband gets a call. The part is out of stock and they’ll have to order it. Um, wasn’t that what we were waiting on. Nope, the Idiot (sometimes called the Idiot King) just ordered the part. He’ll call when he has the part. Ha! Best line I’ve ever heard from a man was, “I’ll call ya!” It rings as true with dating as with anything else.

Nine days later, we finally stop leaving voicemails and get to talk to the Idiot King. They don’t make the part anymore. Seriously. This is what we were told. You mean the repair place let you order a part, then they wait more than a week to tell you that the part is no longer being produced. Yes, we were expected to believe this load of manure. Obviously, I didn’t. I asked for a specific date that I would have a working oven, or that I’d be coming to the Idiot King’s house to do my baking. He asked if he’d get to do a taste test. I said sure, while imagining lacing the brownies with a liberal amount of laxatives.

This finally got some attention. He gave me a date on the calendar that my oven would be replaced since he was unable to fix it. That date was six days away. Yes, I was still waiting for a working oven. The day after he was supposed to be bringing the replacement, we received a call. Silly me for thinking we could get the oven repair completed. And there was an irate me for taking the day off work to be home to let him in so he could bring in the replacement oven. Silly, furious, vexed, livid, snarling me.

The night before the new-to-us oven (Idiot King was too cheap to buy a new oven) was to be delivered, we saw a snippet on the news about an appliance factory burning to the ground somewhere on the other side of Chicago. Little could we have imagined how that would impact us until the Idiot King finally called. The place that he was going to pick-up the replacement from had burned to the ground 2 days earlier. I still contend that he saw the same news report we did and used that as another excuse. Why not?

Another week passes before the Idiot King brings our replacement. When he finally shows up nearly two hours late, he acts triumphant, like he is an Olympian runner that has lassoed the Godforsaken oven to his own torso, and climbed Mount Olympus with it, sweating dripping from his brow each and every step of the way. Not that he had some guys load it into his borrowed mini-van, drove across half a dozen suburbs in clear weather, and had my husband help him unload it. Which, of course, is exactly what happened.

Stay tuned next week for another juicy installment of 3 Chimps and an Idiot.

DH and I recently moved into a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom townhouse after renting a 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom, 3 level house with patio, backyard, fireplace, vaulted ceilings, and an open floor plan. Sounds divine, doesn’t it? Well, not exactly. That simply what you tell people you went to school with, relatives that never visit, and friends that you would like to envy you – as long as they don’t visit too often.

If they did visit more often, they would see the truth. The vaulted ceiling is a huge waste of energy. No one actually uses the fireplace – even the owner wasn’t sure how it worked, so it’s decorative, but not functional. The hardwood floors were actually that pergo, snap-together garbage that started separating after about the first year. Something else no one bothers to mention – ants. Unfortunately, we’d been in the house less than a month when that problem became apparent. Ewww.

Now that I’ve set the scenic backdrop, I must get to the title: 3 Chimps and an Idiot. The idiot would be the landlord, the chimps – a series of rude, obnoxious, lazy “helpers” that couldn’t tell their knuckles from a door knob. Actually, I think I’m being rather kind. One of them was courteous enough to swear at me in Spanish, thinking that I wouldn’t understand him. I did and I know how to dish it right back at him – in Spanish no less. So in a moment of pure fury I called him something I would rather not put into print, but let’s just imagine that it involved a chicken and his mother sprinkled with a very explicit action. Let’s just say it had him speechless.

Like any good lemon, the problem became apparent once we got used to the place. The white carpets had bright orange KoolAid stains, which we made by the owner’s bratty child. I know, I watched her squirt her juice box all over the carpeting in the upstairs hall and master bedroom during the initial walk-though of the place. The landlord promised to send someone out the next week to clean the carpets. 6 weeks later, fed up and livid – I did the cleaning. It took 6 hours to scrub that crap out.

Like any good lemon, this one had its continual problems, and the stove, garage door, dryer, and railings were just the start. Every major appliance had maintenance called on it at least 2-3 times. I can write a book just on the stove!! It didn’t work more often than it did. Good thing I had a crockpot and the ability of pick up cheap convenience time foods – love boxed pasta side dishes by the way – they totally saved my butt, on more than one occasion.

I remember the pride the Idiot King (landlord) took in how the place looked when we did the walk through. He told how he did the work himself, how it took a year to make the house inhabitable again – and it was only a nine year old house, with one previous owner. The Idiot King even went as far as saying that he’s fired his “assistant” aka the Chimps for being incompetent. Once, in a fit of rage (again, over that evil stove), I asked him when he planned to fire the current chimp because he was astonishingly incompetent. Naturally, it was nearly a month before the repairs were done.

Have you had problems like this? Whether you buy or rent, there’s nothing worse than dealing with – 3 Chimps and an Idiot.