Posts Tagged ‘cars’

Audi drivers really are the new BMW drivers. There is a parking space literally just off camera to the right (opposite the curb you see behind you), but this guy chooses to park on double yellow lines while he stops for lunch at the same cafe I was grabbing a sandwich from.

Got home last night to find my exhaust was hanging off the bottom of my car.

This is the new exhaust I had fitted a month or two ago so I wasn’t overly amused. After having duct taped it back in place this morning I phoned my local branch of Alba and explained one of their other branches had put me it on and it was now hanging off and could they fix it.

They said no.

Apparently they also use different suppliers and have to go through those supplies so if I took it down there, they would then phone the branch that did the work and get them to order the part then once they had it it would be sent to the branch I was now at before they could do the work.

So I phoned up the branch that originally did the work who said bring it down and they would get it looked at.

This is where it all goes a bit wrong for the blog post really because shock of all shocks – I had a good experience with a garage! I took it down there on my lunch break and though I spent ten minutes just waiting for them to get round to me once they said they sorted it out for me and didn’t try to charge me either.

It kind of ruins the whole tone of the blog post really as I wrote the first half this morning before taking it down to them expecting to have loads more to rant about, but I don’t. Well done Alba, I guess.

If I did want to continue the rant however I could easily point out that these victories shouldn’t be so rare in modern life. I seem to spend most of my lunch breaks running around trying to fix one thing or the other – the extended blog post about housing that should hopefully arrive in the next few weeks (I’m waiting until it’s sorted so don’t hold your breath) is testament to that. Life shouldn’t be full of all these problems. It shouldn’t be a fantastic day when something is actually sorted as it should be. Still, that is the modern world I guess. Today was a good day.

I took my car in for it’s MOT last Thursday.

It failed. I’ll give you a sentence to guess what it failed on. The answer is – the tyres on the rear axel were different sizes! These were tyres that Evans Halshaw put on fresh when I bought it from them last year and then put the car through an MOT before giving it to me!

As such I booked it into Evans Halshaw on Hunslet Road were I bought it from to get it fixed. No apology offered on their behalf but they did go as far as to replace the tyre – with another used one, they wouldn’t even give me a new tyre.

They also refused to fix the temperature gauge under warrenty because apparently “electrics aren’t covered.” This leaves me wondering exactly what is covered. Tyres, exhausts, etc fair enough but why aren’t electrics covered? They fixed my central locking, I can only presume this is actually gas powered?

In any case they didn’t get any money out of me, I took it up to Alba Tyres today to get it sorted as I didn’t fancy paying the £240 Evans Halshaw wanted to fix it.

Alba were happy to explain that I needed a whole new exhaust because it was actually corroded all the way down but amazingly this still came out almost £100 cheaper than Evans Halshaw.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want anyone to get cancer. But if someone has to…

Be warned, ice may reduce stopping distances. Which is a bad thing when my car is parked up a little beyond your usual stopping distance.

Last night, I filled up for less than £1 a litre!

While many of you will probably remember the days back when it was like £0.90 a litre (and the really old of you may remember when it was like half what it is now – along with the switching on off BBC2, the second world war, etc 😉 ), this is the first time I have been able to get petrol for under £1 since I started paying for it.

I wonder if all the companies that put their prices up due to “fuel price increases” will be dropping them back down again, lol.

Apparently.

I got a letter through last week from my insurance company telling me “it has been suggested you were involved in an incidient.”

I mean, what the is that supposed to mean? Several phone calls later and I am told that it was reported to them by another insurance company but all the details about the incident were blank. I told them to close the claim because I had no knowledge of it or indeed any kind of accident and they said they would sort it out and phone me back.

They didn’t phone me back.

So I phoned them once more today and they told me they didn’t really know what was going on with it so I explained it to them again and apparently they are going to sort it. Hmmm.

…but everyone from Birmingham is bad news.

I got into my car to go to work and sat fiddling with my MP3 player, stationary at the side of the road when a taxi comes past and a crashes into me!

But what really tops it off is his excuse for why he drove into me.

I’m from Birmingham, I don’t know where I’m going

How about, not into other cars. That would be a sensible start, wouldn’t it?

Luckily my car was for the most part fine other than some scuffing on the bumper. Seriously though, how much of an idiot do you have to be to drive into a parked car?

It occured to me as I filled my basket with a mere 3 items at Co-op yesterday to and then pulled out by extra big credit limit credit card to fund the purchase that I am back in suburbia.

Having spent the last 3 years living in student accommodation it feels strange to be back in, for lack of a better term, “real” house. I mean, I have an oven! A working oven! That’s so good. It’s taken until now for me to really discover a way of heating food beyond microwaving it.

And a shower. A proper shower that doesn’t just trickle out a bit of water if you give it 5 minutes. It doesn’t actually output hot water but at least it outputs mildly warm water with a decent force.

Still, I’m not convinced the trade off is worth it. I watched TV the other day. For most of us, we simply stopped watching TV while we are at university. Unless they had TV on at the pub. Now we’re back to watching TV in our own homes. It’s all very depressing.

Not to mention the fact that all the pubs and takeaways are closing at like 11 in the evening.

Finally the distance is starting to bite. Due to so many of us being graduates, nobody other than myself has rushed out to buy a car and start boy racering it around (well, you’re missing out, having a car is suberb) so whenever we’re planning events it’s a case of, “well, how is everyone going to get here?” That’s not to say there aren’t good public transport links because there are – but it’s not quite the same as just living 15 minutes walk from each other.

If there is a moral to be gathered here it is that everyone should buy a car and then we can all go dogging on Thursday nights. Trust me, it feels less weird every time you do it ;). The other problem though is that we are off to Wendy tomorrow – but how? I mean seriously, we all want to drink because opportunities are limited these days but that means arranging some kind of travel. Not just walking down the road. And if we want to leave at different times, what then?

Not to mention the bitching that is going on about parking on the street. Silly little unimportant problems that seem to mean the world – welcome back to suburbia. Still, guess my email address makes more sense now :D.

The central locking is finally working again on my car!

It has been a bit of a mission though. I got a phone call from Evans Halshaw to inform me that the part that had been on order was finally in so I booked it in for a service to take place this morning. Phoned my dad up to see if he could give me a lift to work once I’d booked it in.

Turns out, he had his car booked in for a service at the same time.

I mean seriously, what are the odds? Let’s assume that the car goes in twice a year, that means his car is going in once every 150 days meaning that the probability is like 1%. Still, we worked in some kind of plan as he was picking up a curtesy car.

I was 15 minutes late down there because a lane of the inner ring road was closed off and there was an accident down near Hunslet road combining to some rather large queues. Then we had to navigate our way back to Evans Halshaw Nissan to drop my dad’s car in and finally get me to work. By the time I got to work I felt like I’d done a days work :P.

I have a lot of stuff.

Despite making several trips in my car during the slight overlap period we have I did my main move along with a lot of the house stuff on Saturday morning and managed to pack out my car, Norm’s car, my parent’s Mondeo estate, the trailer on the back of the Mondeo estate and my parent’s X-Trail. Quite an impressive convoy we had going.

Still things are moving slowly. The lounge is still a mass of boxes as is my bedroom and it’s not getting shifted particularly quickly. While I spend most of my time at home sorting through things, when you work 7 days a week, you’re free time is not actually not much time.

Still, I have some days off coming in December, I can use those to unpack.