Stove Review

I was so excited, we finally got the kitchen far enough along to hook up the stove. For the last two weeks it's been sitting in the middle of the living room with the new dishwasher like a set of bookends for Gulliver.

It is a Maytag, and having previously owned a Maytag dishwasher that lasted forever and a Maytag refrigerator that after 5 years decided working was just too difficult, I was kind of rolling the dice on the purchase. But reviews suggested that since Whirlpool bought Maytag the product was improving and, really, how can you mess up a gas stove?

They found a way. We moved it into the kitchen and hooked it up at about 10:00 last night. The burners worked, the clock was set, everything was looking good. Yay, a real dinner coming up soon! Then at 4am I was awakened by a sound resembling that of pressurized gas leaking from a giant acetylene tank, overlaid by a rattle similar to that of a pissed off sidewinder, with an underlying tone of angry wasp.

We futzed and fiddled and pressed buttons and whatever until it was time for me to get ready for work and it still did it every time we plugged it back in. LBB was left to call the help hotline once it opened and after working his way through the voice mail system and pressing 1 many times, found that it was not so helpful. The upshot of the discussion was that they would send a technician out. Next week. 7 days from today.

Now I may be a little unreasonable, but that's just not acceptable. This is a new stove, only connected for 6 hours prior to disturbing my well-earned rest. On top of that I have been living on sandwiches, fast food, and the stuff from the hospital crapeteria for several weeks and I'm just not really perky about continuing to do so for another week.

So off I trotted to the Big Box Store where it was purchased and told them they were taking it back. Surprisingly, they agreed without any fuss. I looked at other stoves and picked one out and they will pick up the old one when they deliver the new one. Now why couldn't Maytag have been so cooperative?