Replacing Bernie

I spent the day looking at cars to replace the dead Citroen Berlingo. By dead I mean murdered…. by a numpty who doesn’t understand what a red light means… or that it isn’t possible to drive THROUGH a car.

I’m not happy about car hunting under pressure. The pressure being that the insurance payout has been sent and we have just 8 days to find a new car and then we have to give back the courtesy car…. That’s 8 days from when they sent the cheque… not from when it has cleared…. so go figure…. 3 days in the post… 5 days to clear…. that leaves ZERO days once we get the cash! We don’t have that type of cash to go out and get a replacement before the money clears, so the pressure is on to find a car from a dealer that will accept a small depost and then the full payment once the insurance money clears….

….and that annoys me….

If I am looking for a car, I like to take my time and not have to force my decision. I like to have private and trade to look through. As it is I can only go trade as no private seller would work a deposit from a card payment (which is the only way I can do it…. remember the crap financial situation I ended up in after my bad back and “support” from my previous company….).

I have been looking for cars for a while ever since the crash – just in case. Trouble is even if I found a car, I couldn’t do anything about it until the money came through… and by then the car I had seen for sale would have been gone.

So… I am forced into an 8 day window with only trade sellers – and I can only search on Saturday and Sunday… so 2 days. That really doesn’t give me much choice.

I reckon if someone crashes into you, then you should get the value of the car PLUS compensation for the fact you are pretty much forced to buy what you need, instead of being able to take your time and get what you want. I may end up with a junker at the end of all of this. I haven’t found the car I want – but they do come on the market several times a week… but I don’t have time to wait due to these insurance restrictions… GAH!!!!

I pretty fed up of all of this stuff – We get all the pain all due to that idiot driver…. whose parents own a car breakers, so he was back on the road straight away. Grrrrrr

Tyred again, but happy

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

No, really. Ha ha.

Remember this?

How about this?

Well… here we go again! After my eventful trip out on Monday in the snow and idiots, I had to call the car lease company up.

It is a company car, so everything has to be done through MASTERLEASE – and once more they failed to not let me down (read it again, it does make sense).

I went out to the car to pump the front tyres up after my Monday trip where I had reduced the tyre pressure. Before pumping them up I turned on the ignition to warm the car up and start de-icing. As the engine started alarms started ringing. My ABS (anti-skid) was showing a fault and my brake pads were showing to be low – “WARNING – CONTACT GARAGE”.

So I thought I’d pump my tyres up and go to work, then do the necessary calls from there. The ABS was an intermittent fault and I can drive with or without it, so I wasn’t worried. The brake pad alarm was a little more concerning, but I know that they have an error margin – and a 20 mile drive wasn’t going to cause a problem.

I pump my tyres up… then as I walk around to the back of the car I see the rear tyre is flat. Totally. Not again…..

So I decide to call work and tell them I’d be late, as after changing the tyre for a space saver I wasn’t going out on icy roads!

I then call Masterlease and give them all my details. They tell me the warnings and the tyre are separate issues that need to go through different contacts. They then took my details to book the garage (I asked for Mill Lane Fiat in Aldershot, as they are close by and very good) and went to put me through to their breakdown service to get the car to a garage. They said even with a tyre change I wasn’t allowed to drive it due to the warning lights. Fair enough.

I asked if I should arrange with the Mill Lane garage for a loan car, but Masterlease said no – that would be dealt with by the breakdown service and not the garage. Apparently the driver of the recovery vehicle would take me to pick up a spare car whilst mine was fixed.

So… Masterlease put me through to the breakdown service who take all of my details again… after a few minutes they then tell me that the recovery contract has expired and I should call Masterlease….. Oh for *^%*&^%( sake.

I call Masterlease and they apologise… take all of my details and pass me onto another recovery agent whom I pass on all my details etc, etc, etc……

So… the breakdown guy turns up – sees the tyre and says he can’t tow it like that and he wasn’t told he’d have to change a tyre. Man oh man – I was happy enough to offer to do it, but I was told by Masterlease to leave it for him to do. Idiots.

So as the breakdown guy changes the tyre he asks where we are taking the car. I tell him Mill Lane Fiat…then explain to him where it is. I then asked if we would pick up my replacement vehicle on route….

Yup, he had no idea about a replacement car… “Sorry mate, nothing to do with me“…

Great… He wasn’t told about the tyre or the replacement car.

I phone Masterlease and explain that the recovery guy has no idea about the replacement car. Masterlease replied “He should do…..” My they are clever aren’t they?

I said that as I know the people at Mill Lane Fiat, would it be okay to get a courtesy car through them and book it to Masterlease…. they replied “Oh yes, that would be okay…“.. &*^^&# If you recall, I had asked that IN THE FIRST PLACE AND THEY SAID NO!!!! Calm…. calm….. calm….

So I ask the recovery guy to hold fire once he had loaded my car on his truck. I then called Mill Lane Fiat… who funnily enough had no idea that my car was going in to be fixed, or that I would need a courtesy car. Good old Masterlease. Unfortunately they had no courtesy cars available, but after I chatted to them they were happy to look over my car to see if it was a quick “there and then” type fix. Bloody good people at Mill Lane (You can tell by the way I keep saying their name!).

Simple solution then. As I had been told I HAD to go with the recovery guy I ask him to drop the car at the garage and I would catch up in my wife’s Berlingo. Once at the garage I would wait for an answer and then drive home to pick Chris up so we could go back to Mill Lane to then collect my car….

Now it would  have been better if I could have just left the recovery guy to drop my car off. Mill Lane could then look at it AND THEN I could go with Chris to pick it up – saving a lot of time and driving hassle… but no – I had to be there to sign the recovery guys paperwork.

Before we left to go to Mill Lane Fiat (they are very, very good) I said to the recovery guy if he could wait at Mill Lane for me, as I would need to de-ice Chris’s car before I could drive it… He said he couldn’t really wait, so in case I didn’t get there in time I signed the paperwork before he left……

YES…. What he had pretty much said was that he could drop the car off at Mill Lane without needing me there… although by now I just wasn’t going to argue. Jeeez.

Eventually the car was delivered to Mill Lane. They measured my pads and carried out fault diagnosis and found everything to be okay. Probably ice and snow causing an electrical fault. Fair enough, these things happen and you can’t find out where the intermittent fault was after the event -I know that form my engineering work.

So cars went back and forth and eventually both Chris and myself are back home. I call Masterlease who then send out the tyre guy (I should have him on speed dial by now after the amount of call outs he has had from me…).

By the time everything is done it is 4pm. Work closes in 1 hour, and I really need to see my boss (as I had hinted in this blog entry). I hadn’t been able to do it the day before due to the snow. I got there with 20 minutes to spare, and then had a meeting with my boss so I could hand my resignation in…. Yes – finally you hear the good news! (not for him, mind you). A resignation should be given face to face – it is a personal thing.

Due to various events last year (including, but not purely THIS ONE) I had to get a new job. One came through with a lot more cash and a better prospect. My current company are putting people on part time and have made a few people redundant due to the credit crunch… SO… more money in a company that is hiring, or less money in a company that is making redundancies (even though I wasn’t going to be one of them). It was a no brainer.

So, as from March I shall be starting work as a Sales Executive within an aircraft interior component manufacturing company – Happy days!

I’ll end with this: The warning fault is back even though I the brake pads are fine. Unfortunately it is now beeping a high pitched beep as well, and it is a pain to drive!!! It isn’t Mill Lanes fault, as I said intermittent faults are a real pain… but the real trouble is I had to call Masterlease again. That was at 8am this morning…. They said they would get back to me…. it’s 1.15pm now and I haven’t heard a thing. Idiots.

If I lease a car in future, I’ll go with LING.