Gap in the Market

One of the most annoying car-related failures took up an enormous amount of time to resolve today. Yesterday evening, I collected Becky from Brownies and when I got into the car I realised that the courtesy light above the front two seats was not working. Simple thing to replace I thought but not as simple as you might think.

I went along this morning to a well known car accessory store and looked at their wide range of bulbs and all I had to go on was the fact that I was looking for a 5W bulb of a particular shape as I had not been able to get the plastic cover off to remove the original bulb. Having spotted the very thing, I went to check it in the product guide only to discover that the interior light for my model was not listed but the one I had selected was indeed the one for the previous model of my car. So far so good.

I got home and tried to fit my new bulb but as it was so fiddly, it kept dropping out at the last moment. I was getting very frustrated and wen to get my toolkit so that I could do it again with the benefit if my crocodile nose pliers to hold one end of the bulb in place. The crocodile nose pliers did their job perfectly, but unfortunately they demonstrated that the bulb was not long enough to fill the gap between the contacts. On comparing the new bulb with the old one, I could see clearly that they were identical in every respect other than their length.

Consequently, off back to the well known retailer (who had offered to fit the bulb a couple of hours earlier only to be laughed at by me with my usual “I’m sure I can manage to fit a bulb” sneer) and sheepishly asked for a exchange on the rather useless earlier purchase for the correct size of bulb. The cost of fuel must have been approximately twice the cost of the bulb and if I was just a little bit more patient, I would have taken the time and trouble of removing the above faulty bulb for a direct comparison before the original purchase.

So that’s about the limit of the fun I’ve had today - how’s your day been?