I don’t believe it.

Yep this is going to be a bit of a Victor Meldrew post, adding probably a dash of “Why me” and a hint of “What did I do to deserve this”.
Anyway, what with everything else going on at the minute, the fact that the car I had bought 5 months ago was just about due it’s first MOT kind of crept up on me and it wasn’t until Saturday that I suddenly realised I needed to get it done within about a week.  Anyway my local garage is pretty good and they were able to fit my car in on Monday.  Now my thinking of how this process was going to go was obviously flawed, my view was that given it was it’s first MOT, nothing major would be a problem, I knew the tyres were fine as I had to replace one about 2 months ago due to puncture and all 4 were well within legal limits.  So anyway when I phoned up to check what time I could pick up my car, the fact that it had failed it’s MOT threw me.

So the question on your lips is what did it fail on???  Well let me tell you,it had the wrong type of headlights, European not UK.  Well my question to the guy on the other end of the phone was, “Huh???”.  But in the end it boils down to this, Europe drives on the wrong side of the road and consequently their cars headlights dip on the left hand side, whilst in the UK they dip on the right.  This means that I have been dazzling cars for the last 6 months!!!! Anyway to cut a story short, my Citroen garage confirmed that I would need 2 new headlights, £500 plus labour, yeah right!!!! The garage where they did my MOT were going to get me a quote.  Thankfully I managed to get in touch with the garage who sold me the car and they remembered that when they had this car in it had two spare headlights, SIGH!!!! Anyway I am heading down there after work to get them, I am also going to try and get the garage to install them for me, I have already used in conversation with them the 3 words, Sold, Car and Illegal and will do so again.  If nothing else fails my MOT people will install them for me on a labor only charge, so at least I am covered.

My old car was a pain in the arse, this new one has decided to pick up the baton!!!

The King is dead, long live the King!!!

Yep I have a new car!!! Woo Hoo, a car that when I put my foot on the accelerator we get faster, doesn’t have an exhaust that rattles for about 10 mins after the car has stopped, a car that wasn’t backed into a metal post on Saturday. However it is a car missing an aerial, which should be resolved tonight. But at the end of the day it’s rather nice, rather new and doesn’t have Juice scrawled across the back by one of my immature colleagues!!!

It’s Christmas Time

Well at least that’s how it feels today, not only am I picking up my new car today, but it also snowed briefly and to top it off, last night when I arrived home, the transfer cable for my Xbox Elite had finally arrived after 3 months of waiting.  This has meant that I was able to move all my games and saves over to the new hard disk and consequently I can now trade in my old Xbox Premium for hopefully about £140, which will probably get mostly spent immediately on Guitar Hero III and a wireless guitar.

Cars, Cars and Sat Navs in Cars

This weekend has been somewhat car related, obviously I am trying to replace my current car and after looking at 2 cars on Saturday and getting a good deal on the trade-in value of my old rattle-mobile I was ready to put a deposit down. However in what is now becoming a tradition, I managed to have a minor prang between getting a trade-in-value and actually handing the car over. Last time it wasn’t my fault, turning right at a roundabout, the car coming from the left obviously forgot what the brake was for and coasted into the side of the car. Thankfully the garage were giving me minimum trade-in so weren’t too worried about the minor damage. This time round it was my fault as I reversed into a post I couldn’t see in any of my mirrors. Again thankfully the damage is fairly minor just the bumper and tail-light and again the garage aren’t too worried about it. Why do I think my car is heading for the breakers yard for spare parts!!! So anyway new(ish) car Tuesday evening, Woo Hoo!!

Sunday saw me and the Mrs driving up to London to see my God-Mother for her birthday, after deciding to drive up last minute we were relying on the good old Sat-Nav for directions and I can’t fault the fact that it got us there, however it’s choice of route left little to be desired. When I plugged the details into the AA website that morning, it gave me a travel time of 1hr 15mins. When we actually left and used the Sat-Nav it gave us an even nicer 55mins. However once we had pulled off the M4 and started going across town, the Sat-Nav seemed to decide that every possible area of slow moving traffic was the way to go and what had initially looked as us being rather early for the 2pm party having left at 12:15 (arrival estimate of 1:10), was soon touch and go as to whether we would arrive on time. As we finally pulled into the Kilburn area, already at 2:05pm, out route was suddenly blocked by a police roadblock around some kind of incident and we had to find another route to cross the railway. In the end that last 2 miles of travel took us another 30 mins and we finally arrived at 2:35pm, some 2 hrs and 20 mins after leaving.

Thankfully the route out to the A40 is one I know and the return trip took us 1hr 5mins. I tell you now that if the Sat Nav hadn’t been worth nearly £200 it would have been a pile of circuitry sitting in the gutter of a West London street at about 2:30pm yesterday.