It requires only one, very simple step:
Rely on the AA to provide emergency breakdown assistance. Emergency my nob. So here goes.
For starters, I know I have a piece of shit car but for all intents and purposes it does its job. It gets me to the beach and back and is reliable. Well, most of the time. Long story short, I’m at the beach, hoping there might be some surf. (Fat chance). Decide to go home, and the car has bitten it. Not sure what’s wrong, but it won’t start. The battery is fresh, and is trying to tick over, there’s plenty of oil, plenty of fuel, no liquids obviously pissing out of anywhere. After a few attempts, it’s 1830 and I figure the best thing to do is call the AA. Hah.
Anyway, when I finally get through and she does her worst best to locate me she tells me, it’s 1845 and someone will be with me by 2030. I even get a text message to confirm it. It initially struck me as odd that it would take so long, after all, Guernsey is tiny and the assistance can have been no more than 15 miles, but being a Sunday evening, I figured it’d be a worst case scenario and hoped to see someone within the hour. I was OK with it though, after all, I could think of worse places to break down.
Needless to say, 2030 came and went, and by 2105 I was getting suspicious. I phoned the AA back, waited on hold for 10 minutes and some spotty oik tells me that he was sorry, but the assistance wouldn’t be with me until 2210 as the garage {insert name of garage} were the only people to accept the call.
That’s right – on a tiny island, it was going to take them over 3.5 hours to get a van with me.
Pissed right off, I asked him if all I could do was sit there like a muppet and wait? He said yes.
After putting the phone down on him, a helpful chap wandered over and I duly explained the situation. His mate then turned up with the suggestion “have you tried jumping it?”. Of course, I hadn’t. 3 minutes later, we’ve jumped it down the road, it’s running sweetly, all sign of its issues a thing of the past. There was nothing terminal wrong with the car – it just need a little juice.
But to add insult to injury, no sooner have I pulled the car off the road to thank the blokes who helped me – the f*cking AA van turned up. Not the garage that the lying oik on the phone told me would turn, up a real live big bright yellow van with an allegedly very very very nice man inside it. Somewhat frustrated, I politely informed him he was over an hour late.
“Nope, I’ve been 7 minutes.”
“What?”
“I got the call 7 minutes ago. I’ve been at Cobo {a beach a mile away} doing nothing.”
So… if you’ve actually got this far, the story is simple – I broke down, the bint on the phone promised me an AA van which didn’t turn up, so when I questioned it I got lied to and was promised one, at which point they actually put the call through, which turned up late because I’d already fixed the problem.
I was a little pissed off, to say the least.
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