Today I woke to find that my cold had gotten worse over night, leaving me with a pounding headache and a constantly flowing stream of snot. That had actually been with me since Saturday, so to find that it was still going strong on Monday morning was at least a show of consistency.
What sucked all the more was that I had to take the car to the garage so that they can repair the damage from the accident I had a week or so ago. Wrapping myself up well, I drove all the way across to the other side of the city to drop the car off at the authorised repair center. I had really wanted to get it done at the Honda dealership that I bought the car from, but couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of organising it all with the garage and my insurer, as the Honda place wasn’t an authorised repair center, despite being part of the same chain.
Once past an overzealous security guard, I navigated my way through a sea of cars. Failing to find a space, I parked my car alongside a row of others near reception and made my way there. It turned out the security guard was just a taster of the kind of customer service I could expect; polite enough not to be rude, but not exactly going out of their way to be friendly.
They took my drivers license to copy it and then sent me back out with a guy called Ian to do a bodywork inspection of my car. He was quite pleasant, and agreed the damage was minor, but since this wasn’t a Honda place they’d have to get the parts in. Knowing the Honda place was but a few miles away, I asked him how long it would take – “couple of days?”
“Couple of weeks.” came his answer.
“TWO WEEKS?!” I blurted. Holey crap.
Worse was yet to come.
When Ian showed me to the courtesy car it turned out to be a poxy little three door Corsa in boy racer red. Apparently it’s a petrol engine, but it sounds like a diesel from the 1980’s it’s so rough, and it only has a couple of thousand miles on the clock. I filled the boot up in one go by putting in Elisha’s baby seat. Man, have we been spoiled by the space in the Jazz – it just kind of swallows up anything we put in it.
The drive back home confirmed an observation I made some fifteen years ago that I would never own a Vauxhall. The Corsa is a plasticy piece of crap. The interior sucks, the handling sucks, the engine is gutless. I cant think of one redeeming feature, other than the volume knob for the radio is nice and big so you can turn the tinny speakers down without much effort.
This is going to be two weeks of utter motoring suckage.
Two weeks! 🙁
