Written by Callie

1. Well first, obviously you’re going to be sad. Why? Because you just pulled your favorite California Pizza Kitchen pizza out of the freezer, set the oven to preheat (and it made all the normal sounds like it was preheating) and then you come back 15 minutes later and the oven is still ice cold. So you have to put that glorious pizza back in the freezer for later and eat two day too old leftovers instead.

2. The next day you’ll have your husband check out the oven. He’ll tear it apart and order a new heating element because surely that’s the issue. You pay for expedited shipping because, well, you need an oven, and it arrives two days later.

3. Your husband wrestles with the element some more and you thank goodness you don’t have kids yet to hear the words coming out of his mouth. He claims it’s done and you turn the oven to bake one more time and pull the pizza back out of the freezer.

4. There’s some more choice words and the pizza goes back into the freezer…

5. You call your Home Warranty people that you pay to fix issues like this faster and cheaper than hiring someone on your own. They send a guy out and he identifies that the issue is some weird part that he needs to check in to.

6. Three days later he calls and says that you can’t buy a replacement part and would have to take the old part out, ship it off somewhere to be fixed, and then reinstall it. So you call the Home Warranty people and they say “let me research that”.

7. Four days later you get a response confirming the oven man was indeed correct (no shit) and the place would need to be sent somewhere to be fixed (a four week process). They offer you a buy out option but turns out ovens are hella expensive and of course ours is a weird non-standard size so we opt to have the part fixed. “Okay,” says the Home Warranty rep, “we’ll contact the oven man and he’ll come back out to get the part within the next few days.”

8. A week later you realize oven man never came. You had kind of forgotten because at this point you’re used to your microwave dinners every night because obviously you can’t cook real food without an oven. You call Oven Man and he says Home Warranty never called him and told him to come get the part and he can’t do that without their say so.

9. On two separate occasions you call Home Warranty (on hold for over an hour both times) to explain that they have screwed up and forgot to tell Oven Man to come get the part. They refuse to admit they are in the wrong and lie saying they’ve called him multiple times without answer. You tell them to call him again while you’re on hold and low and behold nice Mr. Oven Man answers on the first ring. So then he calls you and schedules a time to come get the part.

10. Oven Man comes and collects the part (3 weeks after this whole thing started) and lets you know that it will be at least another 4 weeks to be fixed and maybe another week for him to be able to get back to the house to fix it.

11. You remember that dinners can be cooked on a grill, or the stove and spend the rest of the night on Pinterest searching for those dinners, knowing full well you’re just going to keep living off microwave food until the oven is back.