Fucking cars.
In Edinburgh. Junior has just kerbed his car destroying both lefthand tyres on his older Ford Focus.
"Daddy gips it!"
Two flats, one spare.
Swap one flat for spare to hold car up, take flat wheel to tyre place.
Explain situation, purchase 2 new tyres, one fitted to this wheel, and we will return shortly with the other.
Only the second flat cannot be removed.
Locking nut mangled and tool breaks in it.
To the Ford dealer.... you need the magic key code which we do not have, and then a several week delivery time!
Call out a mobile wheelnut remover guy who has at it with a BFO impact wrench.
After an hour, he has broken the wrench. Gives up.
No longer a roadside job, requires recovery to workshop for possibly destructive removal.
Oh look, he has RAC cover with his insurance.
This is utterly worthless.
Took 5 hours for someone to show up, with robo-texts every 30 mins.
When they finally show up, at 8 PM, its a man inna van, despite being repeatedly told its a recovery job.
He takes one look at it and says "That's a recovery job, mate!". No shit.
He taps at his ipad and calls out a recovery truck.
Incoming text... we are now back at square one, and we can expect another 5 hour wait.
We cancel the recovery, which I think is what they wanted anyway.
This morning, I called a local recovery company and talked to an actual person, and have an actual timed appointment for this afternoon. Here's hoping.
<ETA> Yep, local recovery service:
-Call picked up instantly by human.
-Took basic details, tells me driver will call back shortly to arrange time.
-Driver does indeed call back within 5 mins, and says 'early PM, will call back at 10:30 with more accurate time'.
-Driver calls back at 10:30 as promised, and makes appointment for 12:30.
-Driver shows up at 12:28.
-Cost of recovery from one side of Edin to the other, one hour total elapsed time: £80. Was on the lower end of what I was expecting.
Driver said that around 80% of his work was from people utterly frustrated by RAC and similar.
