'Close(d)' Encounters of the Worst Kind

Most of us have our horror stories when it comes to service-related complaints. Here's one of ours.

It was December 2011, a couple of weeks before our vacation.

The handle of our refrigerator was starting to come off.
In spite of all the horror stories and cries of 'Don't bother it can't be done!' we had heard from other friends about the quality of service, optimism was in the air as we searched for the refrigerator company's service desk number and found it.

We made the call.

The call was answered by a young voice that seemed to have answers to questions that we weren't even asking! After a slew of questions, we were told that someone would get back to us by the end of the day. End of the day did come as it does every day, but not a peep from the company as promised by our friendly service desk agent!

Next morning came the to-be-expected phone call. Not from the company, but from us.
Again, after the same rigmarole of several questions - one would have thought that this was the first time they had heard from us - came the now-standard-for-us,
'We'll have someone call you by 5 pm today'.
In spite of our plaintive cries of 'But you said the same yesterday!' the response was an automaton-like 'We'll have someone get back to you Saar!'

Third day in a row the next day, the response looked even more promising.

'We'll have someone come home this evening by 5 pm Saar! Don't worry! Our database says that the part has been ordered and will be delivered today by 12 pm.' 

We were pretty sure that technology was going to do the trick, third time around!

5 pm came and went with no sighting of neither aforementioned handle nor service engineer.
I was singing 'eppo varuvaro' in the shower.

This went on and one for several weeks interspersed with many an  increasingly desperate, 'I need to talk to your supervisor!'. Where was Krishna Paramatha when you needed him! I guess the high point of this saga was when the service desk agent gave us the name of the vendor that they had placed the order for the handle with and asked us to follow up ourselves!

Other highs included 'Saar, our vendor sold his business, we need to reorder with the new vendor' and 'Saar, we got the part but it turned out to be defective'. The straw that broke this camel's back was when the handle actually showed up, with a service engineer in tow, but turned out to be the wrong part! Guess someone else, someplace else must be blogging about their experience about a broken handle as we speak!

9 weeks later, we still have a handle that looks like Rajnikanth hanging off a cliff with his little pinkie, gravity-defying and clinging on for dear life. With a look that reeks of 'Hah! I told you so!'

Que Sera Sera!
I'm guessing that the company's service desk has marked our case as 'Closed'.