Not a productive day!!!- Breakdown rantings!!!

This morning I went to the park first thing, and for the first time in three days, I didn't find any manky old balls. Booohooo.

After breakfast I went back to bed for a snooze and Ann spent a productive hour doing such things as sending emails, transferring money from one account to another to get a better interest rate, and phoning her solicitor to make an appointment to discuss her will/power of attorney.

By 9.30am she said, 'Trixie, I'm going shopping now. See you in a couple of hours.' She went to 'Straiton Retail Park' and by 11.30am she had returned home. Mmmmmm.................... my human isn't the best 'parker' in the world so when she got out of the car and looked at how she'd parked the car; she thought, 'I could probably park a bit neater than that!', so she jumped back into the car, switched it on and all the lights on the dashboard came on and it made a strange noise but not a starting up the car noise............................ Would the engine spring into life? It would not!!!

This is my worried face!

At 11.45am Ann phoned her breakdown service. She has 'Gold Membership Breakdown Cover' through her car insurance who is 'Yoga Insurance Services Limited'.

Gold Breakdown includes:
Roadside assistance
Home start
Onward destination cover
Up to one hours roadside assistance
Wheel changes
Unlimited call outs a year
Recovery of a caravan or trailer attached to the vehicle at the time of breakdown
No call out charge
Overnight accommodation

Oh and the thing that attracted her most to this breakdown cover, was that one gets to speak to a 'real live person' and doesn't have to do everything on an app.

Sooooooo.................... at 11.45am very nice 'real live person' said that she had to nominate a garage where she wanted the car taken to if they couldn't fix the problem. Well 'Kwik Fit' is literally round the corner from us, but she had to check with them that they had room for the car and then phone the breakdown services back. Seriously? Never had to do that before, but because she'd broken down at home, Ann just did it. She asked how long she'd have to wait until she was rescued and was told between 60-90 mins, but she'd get a text giving her an ETA.

It all went downhill from there............................

At 11.56am she got a text saying the ETA was 13.54. …........In other words two hours later.

By 2.12pm, she'd heard nothing so phoned them. 'Real live person' said that their trackers weren't working, but the 'rescue person' was nearby and would phone her direct within 5 mins.

Rescue person didn't phone her.

At 15.19pm Ann phoned again and after a lot of too-ing and froo-ing 'real live person' said that a 'priority rescue' had come in which took preference over us. Totally understand that, but it would have been nice to have been kept informed. They said someone would be with us within an hour and we'd get a text with a new ETA.

We didn't get a text with a new ETA................. However, what we did get, about 20 mins later, was a link to a tracker thing so we could see where the recovery truck was.

Recovery truck arrived about 4.10pm with a car already on it. 'Very nice guy' said that our battery was flat (don't understand how that can be when my human had driven it up to Straiton Retail Park without any problems) and we needed a new battery. He couldn't tow us out of our car park to Kwik Fit because there wasn't enough room for his truck and our car on the back and he couldn't put us on his truck because he already had a car on there. He was a really, really nice guy, but it seems that 'Yoga' insurance just contract everything out to someone else.

Soooooooo......................... then my human had to phone 'Yoga' breakdown again and tell them what had happened (even though very nice breakdown guy had taken loads of photos & told his boss).

By this time it was 16.43pm. Ann phoned YOGA yet again, and after ranting and raving a bit, got put through to the supervisor, who was very nice. TBH, all the real live people have been very nice, but he wasn't really much help. He just said that he could send a smaller recovery truck tomorrow to take our car up to Kwik Fit in the morning. But................ Ann's got to phone them tomorrow morning to organise this???? Apparently it couldn't be done at 5pm this evening because they don't drop off cars to garages that are closed and the recovery period is between 60-90 mins. What do they do in the middle of the night then?? And they can't just book it in to come and pick up our car at 8.30am. Who knows why not????

My human has lost the will to live?!!!

PS – Thank goodness for BLIP – at least we can record what we're doing every day.