Red Ticket Resolved

I parked the car and wrote the message "sticker in post" on the back of the red warning notice, which I then shoved in the windscreen. I thought it was more believable than "Doctor on call".

Apparently the missing parking sticker has been sent to my office. So I had to ring up for another one. This was kind of interesting because:

1. They knew that they'd sent me one.
2. From the look of my office I could have received one and not noticed.
3. They probably knew that too.
4. Which meant that I was forced to resort to the line "I wonder if someone has taken if out of my pigeon hole" when I was pretty sure that in fact the envelope is under a pile of paper somewhere.
5. I know that as soon as I get the replacement the old one will appear as though by magic.

Anyhoo, they were too nice to actually acuse me of such a high level of incompetence, and so my car is now sporting the sticker and properly legal.

As I walked back to the office from my car I noticed a couple of other cars had scrawled notes in their windscreens too. Which cheered me up.

Red Ticket Blues

Got back to the car in the university car park this evening and there was an red ticket under the windscreen wiper. This is because I am not displaying my hard won parking pass. If I don't display the pass I can face an arbitrary clamping and a fine of forty quid. Never got the hang of clamping myself. I personally can't rationalise "We don't want cars left here so we are going to clamp them in this position". But this may be the limitations of my brain power.

Anyhoo, I remembered filling in the form and sending of the cheque. I'll just have to sort it out tomorrow. I just hope I can get to sleep tonight now....

Scary MOT

Some things in the UK are deeply scary experiences. Perhaps I tend to get more scared than I should, but I must admit that the Ministry Of Transport (or MOT) test has always harboured many demons for me. This is probably because in my younger days I used to own a Mini. The Mini car was noted mainly for two things, the small and neat design and the fact that it could turn into iron oxide at an amazing speed. I noticed that the metal "Angel of the North" statue was shipped "pre-rusted".

So was my Mini. Every year I'd trundle the darned thing down to the garage for its statutary roadworthiness appraisal and find that something else had rusted away/dropped off. This was usually the start of a hugely expensive (for a poor student) and unpleasant bout of tinkering with the fabric of the car to get it into passing form. Eventually of course there was no metal left to weld replacement metal to and I had to endure six months of carlessness. Most unpleasant.

Anyhoo, today we took the "Olde Fiesta" to the MOT place. This is especially traumatic because we are then hoping to sell the little car (we seem to have one car too many). The good news is that they make Fiesta's out of more (or at least some) metal and, pending the replacement of a suspension component which did not break the bank, we are on for the sale. Yay.

ebay relief

I've become something of a fan of ebay. I've managed to sell a few items and last week I bought a lovely little Philips MP3 player at a considerable discount as number one daughter's christmas present (how come I'm buying and giving christmas presents in November is worth a blog entry all of itself). Number one wife has been somewhat sceptical of my cavalier bidding style and I have of course been dismissing these fears with an airy wave of my mouse hand.

Until last Thursday. I wanted to buy a thing which was very hard to get hold of. Paul (so it is his fault) suggested that I tried ebay. And I found one, bought it with Buy Now, and then discovered that the seller actually hadn't got it for sale. And I was a few hundred pounds down.

Now this posed a problem. How do you find out whether or not someone is a rip off merchant without asking outright? The good news was that the seller seemed a regular guy and that it was just the case that he had been misled at his end too. The bad news was that I figured that a really successful operator would be good at sounding regular - in the same way that only the lesser burglars actually wear striped jerseys and carry sacks marked "swag". So it has been a somewhat nervous few days.

Anyhoo, today I got my money back. I have never been quite so pleased to be returned to the status quo.

Playlist Paranoia

In the old days your car had a radio. You listened to whatever the Radio One DJ thought was hot. Whilst not always good news musically this did have the advantage that no effort was involved on your part.

Then we all got tape players in cars. So now we could buy musicassettes or, better yet, make up mix tapes from records that we own.

Now we all have hard disk jukeboxes which hold all our records and we can take to the road with several hundred albums. And we can build playlists, the 21st century equivalent of the "mix tape". The bad news of course is that we are now totally responsible for the music that we play in our cars. If you give anyone a lift you end up obsessing over whether or not they'll like that Bjork track that you thought was rather cool some time back, or get your post ironic David Bowie tracks....

Me, I've now reached the point where if I have company I just whack Radio 4 on....