A guy in a Denver apartment told me his fridge was 'haunted' because it kept turning off.

I went out on a call to a high rise near Coors Field. The guy was dead serious, saying it would just die for an hour every night. I found a loose wire on the defrost timer behind the back panel. When I told him, he looked at me and said, 'So it's not a ghost, it's just old and tired like me?' It was a simple fix, but his take on it stuck with me. Do you ever get customers who blame appliance problems on the weirdest things?

3 comments

3 Comments

west.anna19d ago

Ever get the feeling the ghosts are just a cover for our own bad wiring? I once convinced myself my car hated me before I checked the battery terminals. Sometimes the problem is just a simple, tired thing looking for a little attention.

grace_knight7019d ago

But what about the times when the wiring checks out and the battery is fine? My old house had lights that flickered only in one room, and the electrician found nothing wrong. Sometimes the simple answer just doesn't fit, no matter how much we want it to. It's easier to blame a loose wire, but that ignores the weird stuff that has no clear cause. Maybe we call it ghosts because we need a name for the things we can't fix with a wrench.

bennett.james14d ago

That reminds me of a neighbor who swore his garage door opener was cursed. It would only work when he was alone. Turns out his kid had the second remote hidden in his backpack and would mess with it from the school bus stop. The old man was ready to call a priest over a nine year old with a bad sense of humor.