Don’t look. Tell me what color your dishwasher is. Now Look. Did you get it right?

I didn’t.

It fucked up the Lowe’s fridge delivery manager’s life for 3 weeks and may have lowered the test scores of one 6th grade class in Arizona.

This fucking fiasco started when the Bear decided the man-cave needed a new fridge.

The old fridge was noisy, running all the time and had some black shit sticking out the back. (Don’t call it mold – mold can’t fucking survive in Arizona).

We were in Gilbert for the weekend. She’s ordering the fridge. “What color are your appliances,” she asked me.

“White.” I said with the confidence of a ballroom brawler on his 5th tequilia.

She ordered a new white fridge to match the other appliances and to be delivered in Tucson (100 miles away).

A week later, she comes to Tucson to take delivery.  Two full seconds after she walks in the door… “Your appliances are not fucking white,” she said.

I was looking right at them — looked white to me.

“They are almond.”

She calls Lowe’s to cancel the order. They don’t have the fridge she wanted in almond. It’s going to take a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, the delivery manager started calling her cellphone in the middle of the school day – – every day for a week to give her updates.

Lowe’s can’t figure out which fridge she ordered and for where. Nobody buys a fridge and wants it delivered 100 miles away. Which color is the new fridge? Which payment was cancelled? All these questions required 10-minute phone calls each.

The Bear has been teaching school for 30+ years, and she’s got 6th graders.

“I just started putting it on speaker. The delivery guy would call, and the kids would yell: ‘Hi Bill.”

His name could have been Bob, or Ken or fucking Jesus for all I know. But “Bill” must have liked being the “star” — because he kept calling.

Finally, the real delivery day came. I take a morning off work and wait. Two dudes show up with a fridge. They install it, I sign, and take this picture to send back to the Bear for proof.

Disclaimer: No metaphor was intended with the inclusion, the angle or curve of this banana.

Just as my text with the picture arrives in her classroom, “Bill” calls.

He is on speaker, and she is projecting this picture on the screen in her classroom.  Just to show the kids what kind of an idiot she has to deal with at home.

“I’m sorry about your fridge,” he said. “There was some damage so it wasn’t delivered.”

“I think it was delivered,” the Bear said. The kids started to giggle.

“Well, I’m looking right at it,” Bill said.

“Are you in my house in Tucson?” she said. Bill couldn’t understand why he was being mocked by 30 kids while he was standing in the warehouse in Tucson looking at an almond fridge.

Finally, they figured out they delivered the white fridge. The Bear asks me if I care whether we keep this fridge or not. “It’s all white with me” (he, he, he…).

She started negotiating with Bill on the price. He dropped the price for the delay. He dropped the price for the wrong color. He dropped the price for the “damage” to the fridge (there was no damage on the white fridge). He dropped the price for disrupting her classroom.

The cost went from more than $700 to less than $350.

Those kids didn’t learn shit about math that week, but they all learned the wrong color fridge + 4 phone calls = $350.