We Can't Repair It!

 

 

My garage man has admitted defeat.  After three days of trying to sort out my faulty air con he has admitted that the only real solution is to take the car to the dealer as they have ensured that some aspects of the repair can only be completed by the dealership. 

     One would have thought that air con is hardly an essential system in the running of the car and that repairing it would be something that any tom dick or harry (should those have been capitalized?) would be able to do.  “But,” I was told, “your car is a hybrid,” and that means that all bets are off.

     Even I know that nowadays given the electronic complexity of cars even a simple jump start is something that doesn’t work in modern vehicles and any attempt to try such a positively medieval technique to get the vehicle going again could result in serious damage to both car and also to the human trying to get things moving again.

     My car has an engine and two (count them) two batteries.  This I discovered when one of them stopped working and so did the car.  This was another of those circumstances when ‘return to dealer’ was necessary to get things sorted out.  My problems with the air con are akin to those that you have with the printer.

     It used to be said in the old days of vinal, turntables, hi fi systems, and loudspeakers, that the weakest part of the system was the loudspeaker.  I took the word of whoever felt qualified to say such a thing, whereas my assumption was the disc itself was the most unlikely part of the system, where stereo sound of a full orchestra was coaxed out of a needle going up and down and side to side in micro grooves on a piece of circular plastic.  But what do I know about these things.

     But if records were inherently unlikely sources of rich orchestral sound, printers seem to be constructed to frustrate and infuriate the owner and user.

     I have no intention of restating the evil nature of the pricing of printing ink, making it one of the most expensive liquids that normal people buy, or the horror stories that are repeated all over the internet whereby printers have secret electronic tagging of the number of copies produced and insist that a printer is out of ink when some arbitrary number of copies has been reached, in spite of hearing said ink sloshing around when the ludicrously complicated engineering of the ink cartridge is shaken.  And why is there no standardization for the cartridges?  And yes, that is a rhetorical question.

     One of my printers (and yes, I have more than one, doesn’t everybody?) there are reservoirs for the ink which can simply be poured into the receptacle, and it doesn’t have to be the machines’ own make, any old ink will do.  If that works, why isn’t it standard for all bloody printers.

     The answers are obvious, and they are all to do with money.

     In the dark nights of the soul that visit everyone who has ever tried to print something that needs to be done ‘now’ so that it can be sent off today, knows – that is the time that the printers is at its best-worst.  As it tells you that it has run out of paper, in spite of the tray being well stocked with A4, that there is no cyan ink, in spite of the fact that you are printing text in simple black, that there is a paper jam in spite of the fact that there is no paper anywhere except where it should be.  And then there is the message that tells you that the printer is not connected when you are standing next to the bloody thing with a computer that is sending information to it.

     If you can deal with printers, the logic goes, you can deal with anything.  It is always encouraging, that in a world of ever-increasing technological sophistication, problems can often still be sorted out by the simple expedient of, “turn it off and on again”.

     Unfortunately, this technique does not extend to faulty air con systems in hybrid cars.  More’s the pity.

     I am building up my strength to deal with all the faff and expense of getting things done.

     At least the pool is open on Monday so I can swim my cares away!

 

What a difference a letter makes!

  

Today is one of those by-days, a day when I do not have the car because the air conditioning is (I hope) being recharged as it isn’t working – anything more serious than that is something that I am keeping my fingers firmly crossed against.  The garage in which the car is now residing is one recommended to me by a friend in my pool, and which is owned by another member of the sports complex.

      I have already had a major service and change of tyres done by the garage, and they were professional and fair – in other words a place to bind to yourself with bands of iron for future work.

     Opposite the garage is a bus stop which has a regular bus that takes me to with a few streets of the house.  That bus is the L95 and there is a set charge of 2,90€ - you can either use the exact amount in coins, or you can use the multi-card, which in my case I have not got.

     I knew that somewhere on the chaos of my desk there might have been a money box, one of those with a little screen and a mechanism that counted the money as you put it in that I used to get rid of the smaller coins each day.  Though nowadays I hardly ever use actual money relying far more on my bank card to pay for everything, great and small – from yet another robot hoover (in my never-ending search for the perfect machine) to my cup of tea at the end of my swim each day.  Amazingly I found the tine and after considerable effort managed to dislodge the lid without destroying the whole thing and scraped together 2,90€ leaving my desk looking like someone had opened an impoverished pirate’s treasure chest!

     Thus prepared, I sallied forth to the garage and left my car in the entrance, in a vain attempt to get the mechanics to see to it first and walked, stick-assisted to the bus stop.  I had taken my stick because at that time of the morning buses are often crowded, and ostentatious use of a walking stick usually means that people positively jump up from the disabled seats to show their public spirit.  For which I am most grateful as standing on a bus, even with a firm grip on the rails is something of a challenge for me.

    I even found a seat in the shelter to wait.  The one advantage of waiting for a bus on the main road in Castelldefels is that lots of buses pass, and while they may not be yours, you do get a little jump of positive expectation which keeps you going as each one passes.

    Then my bus turned up.  At least it was the 95, though it did have an ‘X’ in front of it, rather than the ‘L’ that I wanted – but I reasoned to myself, how different could they actually be?  Not much, I thought.

     And, indeed, the bus did seem to go in the right direction and called into the University just before the bridge that would take the bus over into my bit of Castelldefels.  But it didn’t.  Instead, the bus retraced the direction that it had already taken and, horror of horrors, diverted onto the slip road towards the motorway and the direction of Barcelona!

     The second mistake I made (the first being ignoring the X on the bus number) was not to get off at the first stop after Castelldefels, that of the Hospital Bellvitge.  I knew that there was a major bus terminus there, but it was on the other side of the motorway.  I assumed, wrongly, that it would call in at the hospital before it carried on with its journey.  So, I stayed on board and eventually got off in the outskirts of the city of Barcelona!

     I crossed the road and waited for the ‘right’ bus and hoped that my trusty stick and stuttering Spanish would get me the right degree of sympathy that would overlook the dual facts that I did not have either the correct change for a ticker not a 5€ note that I would willing offer for the fare.

     In the event everything worked out, and I got off the bus within an easy walk of my house.

     It had only taken me 2 hours to leave my car at the garage and return home.  A journey that takes approximately five minutes by car.

     You live and learn!