It began as a typical morning in our house last week, with Kathy and me reading the paper in the living room while Alexis, our soon to be Queens, N.Y., resident daughter, upstairs taking a shower. “She’s been in there long enough,” I told Kathy as I headed upstairs for a shower of my own. “Tell her to hurry up,” Kathy said.
I knocked on the door and as told said, “Hurry up,” but it was a few more minutes before I heard the water go off. Apparently, girls have more to do in showers than we do, lots more hair to wash and legs to shave, as my wife explained, so I try to be patient.
I turned on the water in my bathroom, but after a minute or so felt no warmth at all. So much for patience; cursing under my breath I grabbed my robe and headed back downstairs. “ALEXIS!! We are going to be late because you took a 20-minute shower and there’s no hot water.”
“I never had any hot water, either,” came the reply I wasn’t expecting and really didn’t want to hear.
All I could come up with was, “Well, how can you take a shower for that long in cold water?” She answered me by slamming her door.
Of course, when it’s already 80 degrees outside, the water isn’t that cold anyway.
My next move was to climb the stairs leading from my garage to the attic, where the sadist builder back in the mid-eighties decided the hot water heater should go. The thing that had me baffled was that I had just purchased this one from Home Depot last September. And it was a General Electric. If you can’t trust HD and GE, then all that’s left is anarchy.
In the attic, it wasn’t like an oven yet. I looked through the little square glass pane where, in a perfect world, the blue glow of the pilot flame would be visible. Of course, there was nothing. No big deal, I had relit plenty of pilots in my adult life.
I quickly noticed that I wouldn’t need the box of kitchen matches I’d come prepared with as this new and improved 50-gallon job had an igniter switch.
After following the safety steps, I pushed the black gas button down and hit the switch several times, per the instructions on the tank, but got nothing. I waited five minutes, looking over my stuff in its attic graveyard – stuff I had decided I’d likely never need but nevertheless couldn’t part with.
Round two with the tank produced the same discouraging results, so I headed back in the house and toward my cool shower.
I found my paperwork on the water heater, made by the company that for decades claimed, “We bring good things to life.” Some hot water about then would have been a good thing in my life, I thought to myself.
Already late, I stuffed the papers in my laptop bag and followed Alexis to Jett’s, where she needed some work done on her car. What a shocker – more mechanical breakdowns in my life.
When I arrived at work, I found I would need the model and serial number from the tank, which I didn’t have. So using my reporter’s instincts, I called Home Depot. I also didn’t have the receipt, but knew I had bought it last September. I was sure they would have the info I needed in their computer database. After speaking with four people in three departments, I found out the info I needed was not in their database, which seemed fishy to me, but I moved on to plan B, which was drive back to my house, climb up in the attic and copy the info from the tank, which I did.
Next, I dialed the 800 number from the warranty card, which told me that I have a six-year water heater warranty, which amounts to one-year full warrant followed by a five-year limited warranty. Still within a year, I had the full warranty, which reads, “Repair or replacement of any part of the water heater that fails due to a defect in materials or workmanship.” What it didn’t cover, as I would soon figure out, was a defect in its owner.
To be continued ...