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!
