Image courtesy of Greencolander. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

When I first moved into my apartment, I thought that the fridge–three quarters the size of a normal fridge–has the worst vegetable crisper ever. The presumed crisper drawer was weird and narrow, and was really only suitable for eating a lot of cucumbers and carrots. If it had turned out that I really liked cabbage, I would not have known what to do.

I thought this about that draw for several months. It hadn’t occurred to me that the drawer could be anything else.

Then, a few weeks ago, I bought some beer. I ran into the main frustration that my 3/4 size fridge presents: namely, none of the shelves are really actually tall enough to hold a standard beer bottle. Given that I needed to store 12 of them, this was an issue.

On a whim, I stuck one of the beer bottles in my weird vegetable crisper. It fit perfectly. So I stuck another in, and another. Soon I had fit the entire 12 pack into the crisper drawer, two deep, and perfectly side by side. It filled the entire space.

It was this point that I realized that I didn’t have a bad vegetable crisper so much as I had an unmarked, but completely successful, beer drawer. Apparently, whatever company makes 3/4 sized fridges has decided that the single people which are almost certainly using them probably need a beer drawer more than a vegetable crisper.

Given that almost all of my vegetables currently start their life as frozen, I can’t really argue with that assumption.

I don’t know why this aspect of my fridge cracks me up so much, but it does. I think I like the idea of someone really sitting down–perhaps after doing some market research–and trying to figure out how to put their mark on the single person fridge. I bet that they went home from work satisfied that day, knowing that they’d shaken up their staid industry.

Because the beer fridge really is quite useful. I don’t have to try to rearrange all of my shorter foods to handle my desire for drank, and there’s no worry about knocking a beer bottle to its side, or out of the fridge. My tortillas and my mustard and my microwavable Indian food can all have their own space, without needing to worry about being smushed by glass bottles.

I don’t plan to stay in this apartment after my lease is up in April. It’s lovely, but I could get a bigger place for less money elsewhere in town. However, in the meantime, I am excited to take advantage of my strange, tiny fridge and its strange, tiny beer drawer.