The squeaky wheel gets...

A quick anecdote: One of the struggles we've been having for the past couple of months has been that our oven hasn't been functioning properly. It will cook for about 20 minutes or so, and then shut down. Sometime between 17 minutes and 20 minutes, it will decide that since it is going to shut down, it needs to finish what it started, and so food will go from cold to burnt within that final three minutes before it quits.

Since strange things have happened with this appliance all along, initially we thought this might be some sort of illness that the stove would eventually get over. When, after a week, this turned out not to be the case, Michelle duly called our landlord and told him of the problem. He asked if it came back on, and Michelle responded that it did, to which our landlord concluded, "Well, that's okay then."

Not long afterwards, I turned in notice that we would be leaving, and the landlord came by with an estate agent to put the property on the market for letting. It was then that Michelle showed him what was going on, and he agreed that something needed to be done, and that he would call his electrician to come out and look at it. Two weeks passed. The electrician finally made it by, and concluded that the fan was burnt out and we needed a new oven. A few days later, the landlord came by again and got some sort of information on the fan.

Another week or so passed with no word of anything going on. I finally called our landlord (who despite the current story, is actually a nice guy) and told him that I wanted a rent reduction for the time that we had spent without a properly functioning oven. This prompted more discussion between us than we've probably had in the entire two years. It also resulted in one of the oddest possible resolutions to my complaint conceivable. After much ado, our landlord came out on Saturday to take some measurements to ensure that the oven he will be buying will fit in the space. The oven is actually mounted within the cabinet, so this required undoing a couple of screws and measuring the cabinet space. So far, the story is relatively benign. However, this is where it takes a slightly surreal twist.

After measuring the space, and then confirming with me that I was going to be around the rest of the day, our landlord loaded up the oven into his vehicle and drove off. That was the last time we've seen or heard from him since. So, since Saturday morning, we've had a big gaping hole where the oven used to be, and no word of when it might be filled with something resembling an oven, or capable of warming things to temperatures higher than the surrounding room. I'm not sure what the moral to this story is, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't draw any analogies to the old "squeaky wheel" truism.