It fell off the back of a truck, Guv'nor

You may or may not have heard of my interesting experience back in March involving a refrigerator, a trailer and the tarmac of the Frankston Freeway.

While I was looking for the essentials for the place I'm renting, I managed to find a place in Moorabbin selling factory seconds, and they had some very good value refrigerators and washing machines. Deciding that they were a good deal, Les and I went up there to collect them with Lea and Peter's trailer.

Despite our discussion with the salesman who said that I could lay the fridge down as long as I let it stand for a few hours before plugging it in, when another guy brought it out for us he insisted it had to stay upright. I guess at this point I should have realised what would happen and ignored him, but we loaded both the washer and the fridge into the trailer and lashed them as tightly as possible.

Everything went well on the way back, as I was trying to be as careful as possible, but faced with the choice of stop-start traffic lights (and the likelihood of cars being right behind me when accelerating away) or the smooth tarmac of the Frankston Freeway, I chose the freeway. Unfortunately, despite me only doing 80km/h, the inevitable happened. We hit a dip and the trailer bucked the back of the car. Looking in the rear view mirror, I could see the fridge flipping over the back of the trailer, and had visions of the fridge exploding into several hundred one-dollar coins all over the freeway.

Luckily, it landed on the back of the fridge, and despite some pretty major cosmetic damage, it was only in a handful of pieces (most of which would later pop straight back on). If it had landed on the front, then the doors would have been ripped off and it would have been game over.

So, lucky that it was midday and there wasn't much traffic around, we stood the fridge up, moved it to the side of the road, apologised to the drivers who'd just nearly had heart attacks behind us, and lugged it the hundred yards to the car (backing a trailer is bad enough at the best of times, but along a freeway it's just a bad plan all things considered).

I was quite surprised when, after I rewired it, it appeared to work fine. It took a long time to get the temperature stabilised, and it still has the odd strop now and again where the temperature rises or drops to the point of freezing the milk, but I'll throw away a few cartons of milk in exchange for not having to buy a new fridge thank you very much.




So yes, it's a bit more 'second' than it was when I paid for it, but it's doing a good turn.