The Washing Machine Saga | ryuuzaki's Blog

In honor of the arrival of our second washing machine, I thought I would dedicate a blog to cataloging the Washing Machine Saga in full.  'Tis truly an epic tale of biblical proportions after all.

As you may remember, when Vlad and I moved house at the end of August we were moving from student accommodations into a house that had nothing what-so-ever.  As my mother is also selling her house at the moment, we did inherit a lot of her old furniture (including a sofa, an arm chair, a kitchen table with four chairs and two single beds).  However, we had to buy all of the white goods for the kitchen as we all we previously owned was a microwave.

Thus, the day that we moved (August 26th) we ordered a gas oven and refrigerator from Comet, and a double bed and washing machine from Argos.  We had to order everything for home delivery as neither of us can drive.  All of the items were supposedly going to come within a week.

Sure enough, we received the order from Comet within this time frame.  Argos, however, sent us an email to say that our goods had been delayed and so we would not receive them until October 2nd.  Annoying, but we had a laundrette at the end of the street and the single beds so we could at least cope.

The following week, the laundrette was vandalized and so we were forced to start using a different one that was over a mile away.  This is a long way to heave your laundry when there is no bus service going in that direction.  But still, we coped.

On October 2nd, we were phoned by Argos to say that there had been another delay and that we would not get our items until November 2nd.  We were annoyed about this and intended to phone up and cancel our order, but then received a second call later that night to say that our order had arrived in the store and we would receive it the following day.

Here's where the story gets more complicated.

The washing machine arrived and Vlad installed it.  We tested it with a load of our unwashed bath towels only for the machine to breakdown mid-cycle.  A flashing red light told us that the motor had overheated and we needed to call an engineer.

Now very angry, I phoned Argos and was on hold for 45 minutes while I waited to complain.  They said they would contact Norlec - evidently an engineer's firm - who would then contact us within three days to arrange a time to repair our machine.  I told the Argos people exactly what had happened so that they could notify the engineers of the precise nature of the problem.

The Norlec lady phoned us the next day to say that the engineer would be around at 10.30am the following day.  I explained that both my partner and I would be at work at that time and she responded (very rudely) that if one of us was not in the house then they would phone Argos back and say that we were unprepared to have our washing machine fixed so there was nothing that they could do.  As I had only been working for a week and thus had built up no holiday time, Vlad had to phone in sick that day in order to be in the house.

The Norlec engineer came, having not been told the nature of the problem, and thus had no parts to fix it.  He told Vlad that it would take him three more weeks to get the parts in.  Vlad said that there was no need as we'd just call Argos and get them to take the washing machine back, but the Norlec man responded that this was not possible as Argos had no return policy for white goods, thus we'd have to wait for it to be repaired.

I was reasonably sure that this was untrue, as how could they refuse to take back and item of their's that had broken down as soon as I had turned it on?  I was, of course, correct.  Argos offered to replace the machine, but I told them that I'd rather they just took it away and refunded me my money.

Thus, last Wednesday when Argos finally did give me my money back, I went on the Comet website and ordered a washing machine from them instead.  It's a different model to the Argos one and did cost me £20 more, but I've just been put off ever ordering from Argos again.  The new washing machine just arrived and so Vlad will be able to plumb it in when he gets back from work.  Hopefully, this one will not breakdown and so we'll never have to walk to the laundrette again...