I've had to rather traumatically give up my free parking pass at work. This means I have to find a spot in the streets around Prefab Towers. On Friday, I parked in quite a good place on a fairly wide main road. When I came back to the car, someone had smashed into the wing mirror and left it dangling by a solitary electric cable. It reminded me of two things: being seven years old with a tooth hanging by the last string of skin, dangling and twisting rather uncomfortably (I never was quite brave enough to yank it out, and went for days spitting a tooth out at people as I spoke) and how an eyeball might look after being snookered out of its orbit, hanging by the optic nerve.
I drove home gingerly, and most of today has been spent trying to sort out a replacement. The jolly man at the garage under the railway bridge said it would be £175. That's without the time to fit it and before he had screwed the number plate on properly (about time I had a gaffer-tape free car I thought).
£175!
For a mirror!
Blimey!
It spurred me on to test out Halford's customer service, which does those boring ads between Top Gear on the Dave channel. I had done my homework and found a universal mirror for £13.99 on the internet. I started to lose the will to live after giving my registration number three times over the phone to the Saturday chap in the local branch. To make it easy, I even gave him the catalogue number. He spent some time rummaging around in the attic and came back to say he had one. I hot footed it down to the shop, to find that what was behind the till was a towing mirror. I don't have a caravan, and obviously also didn't have a wing mirror to attach it to. The helpful chap went scurrying back into the attic. While I waited, I strolled up to the mirror display and found the one I wanted.
Back to the jolly man in the garage who obviously saw the word 'mug' written across my forehead, because an hour later he charged me £50 to fit it (and do the number plate). As I handed over my hard earned cash, he said I needed some gaffer tape to stop the rain getting in and stopping the window from working.
I tried to look concerned, but regular readers will know that the window hasn't worked for some time.
I was more annoyed that I still needed a roll of gaffer-tape in the glove compartment.
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1 comment:
The wing mirror is one of the spare parts of a car that have the most replacement due to its delicate location. No wonder there are now a lot of wing mirrors available for online shopping with its special features.
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