In a paradigm-shifting revelation this past Tuesday, stay-at-home mom Cheryl Blankford noticed that the new refrigerator she recently ordered is almost certainly an inch or two deeper than her old fridge.
“The actual make and model of the old fridge had been discontinued,” Blankford explains. “But I researched it and was sure to order an equivalent model in the same brand, and I even checked the measurements of the current fridge against all the options at Home Depot to ensure that the new fridge would fit into the space. It took me the better part of a week. I feel numb sometimes.”
And although the new fridge does, in fact, fit the space horizontally and vertically, there seems to be an undeniable extra inch or two of depth inside of the body itself.
“I said, ‘Huh, that’s weird,’” says Blankford. “That’s what I said when I noticed it.”
Blankford first noticed the anomaly while putting away the groceries Tuesday afternoon. “The top shelf of this new fridge—where you put the sodas and milk and other tall items—fits two gallons of milk and a whole Tropicana No Pulp Family Size jug in one column, something the old fridge couldn’t accommodate without the orange juice jug jutting out past the base of the shelf a little bit,” she explains. “That was something I noticed. My husband hasn’t touched me in years.”
Although Blankford never found the previous arrangement to be physically unstable, she always took note of it, and so was shocked when the new fridge—again, an analogous make and model and seemingly the same from the outside—bore vastly different results.
The change in fridge depth has affected more than simply the arrangement of milk and orange juice containers. In an effort to maximize the fridge’s extra room, Blankford has made changes to her buying habits. “Take yogurt—the Gogurt comes in a long box that used to fit perfectly in the old fridge, but now if there’s a Gogurt box on the shelf, there’s nearly two inches of space at the front that are just wasted, so I had to switch to the Yo Crunch, which comes in short, cylindrical containers that can be separated and placed in various places in the fridge for maximum efficiency. Sometimes I scream.”
Cheryl’s husband Larry seemed likewise unfazed in the face of this revelation. “What are you talking about?” Mr. Blankford replied when asked to account for the discrepancy in fridge depth. Mr. Blankford went on to get a beer from the noticeably deeper fridge as he interrogated Mrs. Blankford as to whether she’d splurged on a more expensive fridge, to which Mrs. Blankford responded by bursting into tears and shouting that no one appreciated all the work she did for this family before slamming and locking the bedroom door to privately contemplate the life choices she’d made that had led to this moment.
“Sure, I’d love my old fridge back, but sometimes you gotta roll with the punches,” Cheryl muses, through the door. “My life is a prison; please help.”
