Archive for the 'Driving' Category

Francis Fiat, my beloved car, was broken into last week (Friday 14th March early morning) outside of Will’s house in Manchester (and this is meant to be the ‘nice’ area). He had his back passenger window smashed:

…and my iPod and Sat Nav were stolen Also, annoyingly I’d accidently left my purse in my car after going to tesco; so that was stolen too! The one frickin night I left it in there, my car gets violated. Even more conveniently I had a huge psychology report in on that Friday , and quite frankly I was in no state to be analysing personality test scores. So I was a bit stuck, I’d rang the police, rang the parents, but couldn’t get hold of my lecturer to delay my deadline. I had no money to even buy some plastic sheeting and tape to cover up my window (because my purse had been stolen) and it was looking as though the rain was coming.

I gave Will a lift to work, then drove around for a little bit aimlessly, crying my eyes out not knowing what to do. So I decided to go back to my halls, rang and cancelled all my bank cards (which I found in my bag later in the day anyway *rolls eyes*), and called my insurance company etc, then found some change from my pot in my room and went to B & Q to get some tape. Luckily, Will managed to get through to the head of psychology and I got an extention with no chance of penalisation. Got my window all covered up, and booked for Autoglass to come and fix my window on the Sunday -which was enough hassle let alone what was to come.

So Sunday came, the guy from Autoglass had to ring me 4 times to work out how to get into my Halls carpark (when I had already explained to the man on the phone to inform the man coming to fix my window how to get in “underneath the building, ramp on the left, press the reception button I’ve informed them that you’re coming and they’ll let you in” it’s not friggin’ rocket science ! ) Finally he managed to get in and he started cracking on. Half an hour later or so, he was finished. He showed me the window working (which was good -apart from the window isn’t Fiat and so doesn’t match), then said, that as he was taking the door panel off there was a small crack at the bottom and the whole panel cracked off. He said, to quote “I’ve glued it back on and it’s barely noticeable” The Jim Royle part of me then took over in my head as I thought to myself “Barely noticeable MY ARSE!” It was done so badly, and even though I am a huuge perfectionist, I reckon even a normal person wouldn’t be happy. I asked him if he could do anything, and he said, “well there was a crack and I couldn’t do anything, you’ll have to get a new one from a scrap yard”. I couldn’t believe it. I paid £70 for that!

As soon as he’d left I got on my phone to the complaints department. They said they would ring me on Monday morning and would order a new door panel from Fiat. So not only did he lie saying it was nothing to do with him, and he couldn’t do anything; he actually went through damages already on the car with me before he started to cover his back and mentioned nothing of a crack on the door panel!

That night, after further inspecting my car to find glue on the material of the panel, and screwdriver marks on the handle, the central locking went dodge! Spazzing out whenever I tried to lock it, it kept unlocking itself! Creeped me and Will out, thought we were going to get locked in my car! Eventually after opening the back passenger door and slamming it shut, the locking went back to normal, luckily!

So, 2pm on Monday and no one had rang me yet, so I rang autoglass, and it took the girl on the phone about 15 minutes JUST to bring up my file on the computer. After all that hassle, I just ended up passing everything to the Blackpool department, because I was coming back to St. Annes for Easter. After conversing with Blackpool just once I was impressed at how competant they were compared to Manchester, and my door panel was arranged to be fitted on the Wednesday no trouble.
Everything was sorted out fine (Kudos to Blackpool Autoglass), and now Francis is perfect again (apart from his scratches on the driver door courtesy of some wanker when I was in Spain and Francis was unattended )