DOH! Oh Dear!

A female deer…   No?  Oh well…

It’s always good to try to start off with something humorous as in my experience, if people are laughing, then they’re taking in what you’re saying.  And now you can have a laugh at our expense as we have both done something pretty stupid recently.

Those who followed my "The Search for Nessie” blog will know that we went to Scotland for our summer holiday this year.  Whilst we had decent weather (for Scotland) we thought it would be nice to get some proper sun on our faces and so booked a holiday to the Algarve from Southend airport on Easyjet at half-term.  Or so we thought, anyway.  The Algarve? Yes.  Southend airport? Yes. Easyjet?  Yes.  Half-term?  No.

The reason for this monumental cock up was ENTIRELY down to the fact that the new Principal at the secondary school that 3 of our kids attend had spent all of her time implementing her new zero tolerance uniform policy and not making sure the term dates on the school website were updated. Ok, ok, I suppose I have to shoulder some of the blame for not noticing that it said "School year 2011-2012" at the top. In fact, I only became aware of the problem after one of my staff said to me, “I thought you were away at half term?”

                “I am.”

                “I don’t think so; not unless your school has a different half term to everyone else’s. Half term this year goes into the first few days of November.”

The breaking of this news coincided with the arrival of a very firm letter from the new Principal advising that under NO circumstances would term time holidays be authorised. Brilliant. Having never taken any of the kids out of school before, here we were yanking three of them out at once.  But what were the options?  I checked to see if we could change but there was no availability the following week and the situation was exacerbated by the fact that the flights stopped at the end of October anyway so even though we could get out, we couldn’t get back.  Could we cancel?  I scoured my insurance policy but couldn’t find the “Imbecile Cover” clause so an insurance claim was a non-starter.  The cancellation fees would mean I would lose pretty much the whole lot and we couldn’t afford to lose that money, so the Algarve it is.  However, as I'm finishing this, we've just arrived and I'm sitting in the hotel bar by the pool sipping a hot chocolate as I survey grey skies and rain of biblical proportions. It's about 15 degrees. I guess that’s karma for you.

Bad as that may be, my lovely Dawn managed (in my opinion) to top this a few days ago and in doing so has given the RAC man a story to dine out on for weeks.

We've had a ton of expense lately and with anniversaries, birthdays and Christmas looming, what she therefore DIDN’T want to experience as she turned right into our road was an extreme tightening of the steering wheel accompanied by a sound akin to the rumbling of a distant aircraft.  As she straightened up it passed, but turning right into the drive the same thing happened, only worse as this was a sharper turn. The wheel encountered so much resistance she thought that something like the axle was going to break.  An inspection of the front wheels didn't reveal anything in particular that would cause that. 

Once indoors, she called the lovely helpful guys at Leigh Service Station and explained the problem.  One of them said,

                “Hmm, don’t try and drive it, call the RAC in the morning and get them to bring it round here.  We’ll sort it out for you.”

Helpful though that is, it’s not ideal bearing in mind that we were on holiday in a few days’ time, plus there was the question of how exactly we would be paying for this?  There were visions of trading it in and getting something newer but the timing for that sort of expense couldn’t have been worse.

The following morning we called the RAC who came out very quickly, within 35 minutes in fact.  Top, top service.  The guy wandered over and we left him with the key whilst we were trying to usher the last remaining child out of the door to go to school.

I watched him through the window examine the exterior but he clearly found nothing that would explain the situation. He then turned on the ignition and moved the wheel to the left… no problem.  Turning back to the right there was immediate resistance once he had gone past the centre and I saw him try to get it to budge but to no avail.  At that point I stopped looking as there were £ signs dancing before my eyes, so I went off to do something else. When I came back I saw him gingerly reversing the car out of the drive.  He seemed to take an age manoeuvring round before driving away up the road.

In just a few minutes he was back and turned right into the drive, seemingly with no problem.  Dawn went out to meet him and was prepared for the worst; after all her Ford Focus was coming up to 10 years old. I was inside, surveying the scene with fear and trepidation.  I half expected the RAC man to shake his head and pull a blanket up over the front of the car before taking it off to Focus heaven.

Instead, I saw Dawn clasp her hand over her mouth and then shriek with embarrassed laughter.  The problem had been caused by the cable from the Sat Nav to the 12V electrical socket being caught up and wrapping itself around the steering column.  This had created the resistance and the noise made was simply the straining of the cable on the socket.  As soon as he’d unwrapped it, everything was fine!

We both felt pretty stupid and it was one of those moments where you just want the ground to open up and swallow you.  I was concerned he’d charge us for wasting his time but he was very understanding about it and all’s well that ends well.  Top marks to the RAC.

But that was, as I understand the youngsters these days would say, an EPIC FAIL.