Who needs a fridge?

A local student announced that after last week’s weather, he was selling his Philco C-887 refrigerator and freezer and just keeping any perishable food out on the counter due to the temperature in his apartment. 

Wind chills as low as -108^o F were recorded last week in Mount Washington, NH, but on the third floor of a Garden St. building, temperatures were low enough to keep the bag of frozen vegetables frozen. After wearing his coat around the apartment, the local student opened his fridge and realized it was the same temperature as the rest of his apartment. After some time looking up how much energy a refrigerator uses and learning that it’s one of the most energy-intensive devices in a typical apartment, it didn’t take long to empty the fridge (mainly because there wasn’t much in it) and unplug it. Off the Press first got this tip when we were on eBay looking for a new fridge for our office and came across his posting. We weren’t about to tell him how it’s going to be too warm again in like two weeks.

The first step was to go to his apartment. We were immediately impressed with the fridge which was a nice old magnetic model and looked super retro. Our editor took some time to get his body inside the fridge. Due to it being unplugged already and the temperature being the same inside as out, it wasn’t as exciting when it got dark because the light wasn’t on in the first place. We also learned that it is really hard to open a fridge from the inside, because why would you ever be opening a fridge from the inside?

We gave him $10 on the spot with a plan to work out a fancy financing agreement that involved APR and credit scores and CVV numbers to pay him the rest of the value later. The real trouble was getting it down the stairs. One of our writers wanted to try riding it down the stairs like a sled, but there were some corners that would have blocked it. The same idea was rejected 10 minutes later when he offered to get in it and go down the stairs like a stuntman going over a waterfall in a barrel. Except of course in this case the barrel is an old fridge from the 60s.

We then decided to go with the barrel idea because there ended up being no other options. At each turn in the stairs, we went up to the fridge and twisted and rolled and cajoled it into turning a bit to get around the corners so it would keep sliding down. Our writer who volunteered to go in told us that he did maintain the Superman flying punching fist pose the whole time, but there wasn’t much space so they looked more like a baby about to punch a spoonful of mashed sweet potatoes. Of course, it was dark inside the fridge so no one could see for sure.

After we got the rectangular prism of thermoregulation out of the apartment, a long walk to our offices began. It was unfortunately very windy on the day, and the 12 square feet of one face of the fridge acted like a massive sail that kept pushing us around. We finally got it into our office building and had to do a much more challenging barrel waterfall exercise because this time we were going up the waterfall. Six hours and 170 unnecessary extra pounds to carry later, we got it into the corner of our office where we found there was no outlet to plug it into, so now it’s a filing cabinet.