Car Trouble Redux

Saturday, April 1, 2006 11:26 PM

So, I finally got my car back on Friday after almost four weeks. The garage surprised me several times over: I could (and thus did) pay over the phone, and they drove it to my house for me, which saved me the incredible difficulty of getting to them from where I work before they close (earliest I can leave work is four pm, takes just over an hours to get there and they close at 5.15, bloody useless). Then, they had even washed the car, both the outside *and* the inside too!

But then there was the final surprise.

When I went out Friday evening, everything was fine for the first ten minutes or so. The fuel gauge was on a quarter, and all was well. Then the needle took a nosedive and suddenly the engine was stuttering, and slowing and speeding up again. I wisely turned around before I started down the really big hill that is on my route and headed back for the nearest petrol station, at the bottom of a fairly steep and quite winding road.

I had my foot on the clutch so it'd roll, but the thing kept stalling and the power going off, so I had no foot brake and the power steering wasn't. I could barely turn (on the aforementioned winding downhill road) and all I had to stop myself was the handbrake. Eventually I just turned off (or rather kept going straight, since I couldn't steer) into a side road and pulled on the handbrake, skidding to a stop in the middle of a junction.

Needless to say, I was a mite irritable by this point.

Some helpful folks helped me to get the car over the curb that was between me and the handily placed local shop car park right infront of me, then I headed down to the petrol station on foot. Bought a petrol can, filled it, paid, went back to the car and filled it up. Hey presto, it worked again. Drove it to that petrol station and filled it up all the way. After that, it was perfectly fine.

It's not that they didn't put any petrol in it, because no one would expect them to do that. It's that they didn't *fucking* tell me my car had practically no petrol in it and wouldn't go more than five miles without requiring a refill. And there's a petrol station just less than a mile away from my house, so if I had known I could've gone right there and there would've been no problem.

All in all, the people at that garage are a useless bunch of bastards who could well have fucking killed me if I had continued on down that big hill.

So, yeah, that was fun.

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