MoT and other tribulations

After last week's sad MoT failure, I took my car back to the garage on monday to have it's cracked thingummy replaced. Which meant having a courtesy car.

The piano-owning-mechanic led me out to the car park and stopped in a rather puizzled way, in front of a parking space which was conspicuously empty.  it should, apparently, have contained a Ford Fiesta. It didn't.  Which is why I ended up with the keys to a souped up Golf GTi. 

It's been a while since I drove a car with a manual gearbox, so when I couldn't get it into reverse I throught it must be me. Until the piano-owning-mechanic came running back to say "Oh, I forgot to mention. Reverse isn't where the gear lever says it is..."  Which made it an interesting drive. Most of the other stuff seemed to be where it claimed to be.  Although I never did find how to make the seat sit up, or whether it was even possible. 

When my car wasn't fixed by teatime I was quite pleased to swap the GTi for the (elderly, diesel) Fiesta, as I could at least sit up to drive it, plus I'm used to Fiestas. My mother used to have one, which she let me drive to Bristol every day for a year when I was living at home and attending university.

And tonight I got to pick my car up, all newly MoT'd and legal again. It has some new springs in it's suspension, and some new shock absorbers. And they did the thing where they saved the old oily bits to show me, presumably to satisfy me that they had actually put new bits in my car, rather than leaving it parked round the corner for 3 days while they played poker or piano or whatever. Of course, as a fraud-detection method, this does rather suppose that I can recognise my own cars oily bits. And that I can identify that the specific oily bits I'm being shown bear any relation to the part of the car which was in need of fixing, which,e xcept for things such as punctures, I mostly can't.  I can identify the wheels. If I evr i have wheel issue Ishall confidently be able to recignise that they are wheels, and probably even that they are the wheels of my car (or wone of its close relatives) but that's about it.

Anyway, I have my own car back, with some new springs and shock-absorbers, and a certificate to say it has passed it's exams and I am legal to drive it for another year.

I have to wait for the bill. It's going to be posted to me. Which has the minor advantages that (a) I can arragne to be sitting down when I read it and (b) I shall be able to have it on next month's credit card statement, not this one.

Small mercies...