When I helped put out a 50-inch LCD television that was priced at $799.99 onto a television stand out on the pawn shop floor, I'll admit that I didn't expect it to sell very quickly. Who would spend that much money on a used television? Well, someone did, and it was gone within four hours after being put on display. The empty television stand was refilled with an additional LCD television, this one of more humble proportions at only 42 inches. Anyway, the 42-inch LCD TV is still for sale, but the television stand upon which it had rested is not. Someone bought it out from under it, and I found the television sitting on the floor, unplugged and with a dark screen.
When I asked what we were going to do about the television (it seemed unlikely that we would leave it sitting there on the floor and there were no additional TV stands we could use), I was instructed to find two mini-fridges of similar heights, cover them with some fabric, and then use that as a make-shift stand.
I was not pleased.
1) We may have a slew of mini-fridges, but matching heights required shifting through the several stacks of them until I could find a suitable pairing, thus requiring much time and energy. 2) When I finally did manage to find two fridges of very similar heights, I had to haul them down from the second floor storage area, through the disarray our back room is in, and then across the showroom floor. 3) The fabric with which I was supposed to cover the fridges was stored in a tricky, elevated location which first required snaking through a jungle of bicycles and then reaching above my head to try and pull down the desired fabric (I chose the slick golden cloth as opposed to the velvety purple one) off a shelf without pulling all of the extra items around it down upon me.
As it turns out, none of these individual tasks proved as irksome as I had originally expected. I quickly found two of the same exact mini-fridges (removing the difficulty of matching heights), both very lightweight (making them very easy to move from storage to the showroom floor), and the fabric easily came down from its perch detached from all the other items surrounding it (no head injuries were suffered). The real problem was something unforeseeable and came when I opened one of the mini-fridge's doors after I had moved it to the showroom floor.
A stench unlike anything I'd ever smelt lunged out at me and was so overpowering that I nearly fell over. My throat constricted and I turned away with what must have been a ridiculous look on my face. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but if you imagine fusing the semi-pleasant smell of a new refrigerator with the wholly-unpleasant stink of diseased flesh that has been rotting between Satan's teeth for several hundreds of years, you may come close to understanding what I faced.
I asked my manager if I should just shut the door and forget about the stench or if I needed to do something about the noxious fumes. Her first reaction was understandable. She asked if the fridge just needed to be cleaned out.
The answer was no.
The strange thing was that the fridge looked immaculate on the inside. It would be natural to assume such raunchy fumes were wafting off a cesspool of mutant, radioactive puss, but cesspool there was none. I was instructed to put the offensive smelling fridge in the back and leave the door open so it could air out. I did so and was happy to flee from its presence, but this meant that I had to find two additional fridges to use as a stand. There was another substantial amount of mini-fridge shuffling and then of hauling them across the store, but being free from the Satanic cesspool stenches was well worth the trouble.
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