Sometimes, you just decide that you’ve gotta fix something, and you’re not going to rest until you’ve won a battle of wits and wills against a piece of plastic. Most of the time, though, you don’t have 80,000 people watching you do it.
Today, Twitch star Ludwig Ahgren, trapped in the purgatorial “final” hour of his 17-day subscription marathon that will earn him hundreds of thousands of additional dollars (only a portion of which he’ll actually get to keep), decided to fix his freezer’s ice bin.
“My fridge ice machine doesn’t work,” Ahgren said during his stream, “and I can’t get the ice. Does anybody have this fridge?”
It’s been a rough day for millionaires.
What ensued was some of the most strangely riveting streaming content I’ve watched all year. Ahgren attempted to remove the ice bin. Lifting the latch and tugging on it did nothing.
“Do I pull up?” he asked. “Out? Out seems good. But it doesn’t do anything! I can’t get my ice machine out, and then my little metal shit in there won’t spin, so the ice won’t fall.”
He was definitely playing up his frustration for the camera, but there was a universal human truth to his tone: The ice bin had become his Enemy. Either it would fall, or he would. Who could blame him? On the bin were the words “Removable Ice Bin.” They loomed large, taunting him. But it would not move. Countless men have lost their minds to less.
Ahgren then tried a barrage of different, increasingly galaxy brained approaches. For example, he attempted to jab a knife sharpener down into the ice bin:
Then he poured warm water, from a kettle, down into it, to try and loosen things up:
After this, he pulled on the bin, and it moved a little bit. Progress! Glorious progress! But then he closed the door and tried to make ice come out. That was a mistake. Immediately, all the water he’d poured into the ice bin came flowing out.
“I didn’t think about that,” he said. “That’s where all the water went. That makes sense.”
All throughout this process, chat made various suggestions, some quoting directly from the refrigerator’s instruction manual while others yelled that Ahgren should use a blow dryer or “PUNCH IT.” One viewer very helpfully noted that perhaps the ice was not coming out because it was frozen.
“’It’s frozen,’” said Ahgren, reading the viewer’s comment. “Yeah! It’s a freezer! I would hope that it is frozen...Did I fuck up by having my freezer be frozen? Oh, I’m sorry. I should have had the melted freezer. The warm one, the warm kind. Like, the pantry of freezers. It’s frozen, but their shitty, trash-ass design—KitchenAid, you shitters—makes it so I can’t fucking [remove the ice bin]. Is that in the rulebook? The manual? ‘Don’t freeze your freezer. Otherwise you might not be able to open the ice bin.’”
Perhaps you can judge him for this. I can’t. I have absolutely ranted to myself using very similar expletives while trying to force technology to cooperate with my dumb, meaty hands. If you’re being honest with yourself, you probably have too. Granted, neither you nor I were being watched by 80,000 people, nor do we have over one million dollars. But in case you still somehow believe that wealthy people are intrinsically smarter and better at things, here’s even more evidence to disabuse you of that notion. We are all fools in the eyes of god. And KitchenAid.
This process carried on for nearly an hour. Finally, Ahgren’s partner, fellow streamer QTCinderella, approached the fridge.
“No, no, no, don’t put your hand up here,” said Ahgren.
“OK, I won’t, but look,” she said, brandishing the knife sharpener. “There’s a bunch of ice, so go like this.”
She motioned for him to insert the knife sharpener into the bottom of the dispenser—not the top—to break up a large chunk of ice. Ahgren then held his phone up to the underside of the ice dispenser, only to drop it and send chat on a harrowing ride to the floor. “OW,” many of them wrote.
He asked his viewers if they saw the ice. They did. It was a big chunk of ice.
Ahgren proceeded to stick the knife sharpener up into the dispenser and wiggle it around. Multiple tiny icebergs exploded out.
“Oh my god,” he exclaimed.
“Look, I helped,” said QTCinderella.
“You helped,” said Ahgren. “You saved us!”
“Never let a man do a woman’s job,” she replied.
Ahgren was then able to remove the ice bin from the freezer.
“We did it,” he whispered reverently. “Today, I won.”
Triumphant, he spent the next several minutes wiping down his floor.
.