Wretchedness

Somehow, I knew when I took this shot at 8.50 am that it would turn out to be today's blip, but little did I know hoe appropriate an image it would turn out to be for a truly dismal and dreadful day.

I was up at the crack of dawn to leave the car in for a pre-NCT (National Car Test) service. As with so many motor dealers, the crowd I was taking it to have moved out of the city to a far-flung industrial estate, this one just barely within the confines of county Dublin. When the service manager asked me when I'd like it to be ready I told him it would suit me just as well to leave it until tomorrow morning to pick it up. 'Okay', he said, 'but we'll give you a ring later today anyway and let you know if there are any problems.' Fine. When I made the service appointment last week, I mentioned having left the car with them last year to have an electrical problem investigated. The car radio had been turning itself on and had drained the battery several times, I was due too go away for a week, and didn't fancy coming back to find the same thing had happened again. When I picked up the car that evening I was told they'd run every test imaginable on the electrics and hadn't found anything amiss, which suggested the radio itself was defective. I gave them the go-ahead to remove it and return it to the manufacturers. being notoriously bad at following up on things like this, I've been driving around for the past year with a gaping gap in the dashboard. Feeling pretty sure that this wouldn't go down well when it came to the NCT, I asked them to check their records and let me know what the outcome had been. I mentioned this again this again and the service manager said he understood they'd located the radio. He promised to let me know when he phoned me later in the day what had happened.

As I mentioned, the motor place is situated in an out-of-the-way spot. I asked where the nearest bus stop was to get me back in to town and was given directions. The route involved taking my life into my hands at every turn. There was no footpath, just a narrow dirt track along the side of the road, the flow of traffic was constant, and none of the drivers made any allowance for my trying to negotiate my way along. (It was at one point during this stressful walk that I spotted this derelict building and blipped it.) I finally found the bus stop, the bus arrived twenty minutes later, and the journey into town began. It would be hard to imagine a more depressing trip, through the most ugly parts of the city outskirts, over speed bumps which jarred every bone in my body on the upper deck of the bus, snakily negotiating stretch after stretch of roadworks and passing through terribly rundown suburbs before eventually reaching the city centre. Then there was another fifteen-minute wait for another bus to get me back home. By the time I opened my own hall door I was delighted not to have to do all that again later in the evening.

By 5.00 pm I'd still heard nothing from the garage. When I reached the service department the guy who answered said he'd only been told that I'd be collecting the car in the morning. 'What about the promise of a phone call?', I asked. 'I was to be told how things had gone with the service, what the story was with the radio, and how much it was all going to cost.' 'Oh. Hold on.' When he'd eventually finished dealing with 'another customer' he told him the car was fully NCT-ready, that the radio had been repaired and re-fitted, and that the total bill was 337.92 euro! Gasp! But what can you do? Then the service guy phoned back five minutes later to say the price he'd given didn't include the cost of the radio repair, and that the actual bill was 434.40 euro!! I'll have another 50 euro to pay for the NCT itself, then there's 85 euro on top of that by the end of the month for motor tax renewal. Maybe I'll stick to the bus.

But that isn't all. Oh no, this really was the day from hell. Between getting home and speaking to the garage, I got an email from one of the guys in the music group, the upshot of which is that the bad feeling which I thought I'd successfully defused on Saturday continues to fester. It's enough to turn a guy to drink, but fortunately I didn't give in to that temptation. Instead, I retired to bed for a while to help clear my head and try to get rid of the knot of tension which was plaguing my stomach.

So, this early-morning blip sums up my day perfectly.