Close your eyes for a moment and imagine something for me. Imagine that it’s about 2am and you’re flying high over Never-Never Land, deep in one of those heavenly sleeps that you only hit once or twice a month, if you’re lucky. Now you’re just about to accept the Pulitzer Prize for being the funniest humor writer on the planet or something when suddenly all you hear is this horrendous grinding noise, kind of like when your wife tries to drive a manual transmission and comes within seconds of blowing out the clutch. If you’re not married, try substituting the sound that your garbage disposal would make if you tried to shove the gear shifter from your manual transmission down it … repeatedly … for the rest of the god-awful night…

Ok, now stop imagining – do you think that’s the sound that a refrigerator would make the night before it was ready to explode? Seriously, I’m not exactly what I would call an “expert” in this sort of thing, so I’m kind of looking for any sort of guidance that my faithful, loving readers might be able to offer! Or maybe you don’t really know much about refrigeration, but you’re familiar with what other kitchen appliances sound like just before they’re about to blow up … really, anything might help at this point.

I’d love to be able to just call our landlord so that they can have the local repair guy come out and magically make it not explode, but after that little $98 err in judgment from last fall I’m not entirely sure that they’re going to buy into my refrigerator-related shenanigans anymore. My luck, they’d send somebody out at the going rate of one bajillion dollars an hour, he’d walk in, take one look at the fridge and calmly explain, “No – your refrigerator isn’t about to explode. It’s just, eh, sighing. Yeah, that’s it, kid – it’s sighing really loudly like that because of all this ice cream in here. Try putting a vegetable in it once in a while and it’ll be fine.”

“By the way, this call would normally be a hundred million dollars, but I’m gonna cut you a break because I remember you from before and clearly you’re an idiot…”

Yeah, as you can guess, I’m not all that anxious to recreate that particular scenario here in this little corner of my life that I like to call reality, but I’m not really sure what other options I have at this point. Really, it’s either suffer the embarrassment and potentially get this thing fixed before it blows the whole house sky high, give up on sleep for the remainder of our stay in this house because clearly I’ll be having none of that as long as this continues, or possibly just forego the fridge altogether and claim that final laugh for myself!

Now hear me out because the more I think about it myself, the more I think it might actually be doable! Step One – unplug this infernal racketeer and kick it to the curb like a tree the day after Christmas, good riddance. Step Two – we take a lesson from our ancestors and move backwards with technology by installing ourselves one of those ice boxes that they used to have … you know, the ones that were cooled by actual huge blocks of ice! I’m not exactly sure how hard it is to get those huge chunks of ice delivered in this day and age, but it can’t be any harder than trying to sleep in the vicinity of my refrigerator turned buzz saw – that’s for sure.

What’s that, naysayers?! They don’t make my beloved ice boxes of yesteryear anymore?! I should just suck it up and call in the repair like a man … or at least a man who wants to get enough sleep so that he’ll survive long enough to get married later on this fall?! Better yet, you’re going to make the call for me to save me the embarrassment and show your undying support for the funniest humor writer on the planet?!

I knew you guys were the best.

So in the meantime, if anybody needs me, I’ll be imagining a home filled with peace … quiet … and most importantly, not our refrigerator.Because I had a dream, and one of these days, with your help … or the help of a certified GE technician, I’d love to have another one…