waiting for the van

Domestic chores today waiting in for the replacement washing machine. It arrived with two separate vans of fitters.

Then the phone rang to say my car is finally fixed.

So a convoluted journey through today's snow to drop off the temporary white car, and then to wait around to get a lift to the garage where my own car has been resting for the last month.

"Any paperwork?" I asked.

"No just the key; all the charges go to the other company." That's the company who originally replaced the windscreen. They've run up quite a tab with the windscreen (on insurance), the making good, which I think was quite expensive, plus the hire car fees. I waited around idly watching the snow whilst they retrieved my car from the lot. It was clean and sparkly like new again.

Then the strange feeling driving my own automatic again after a month of varied manual gear vehicles. How do I activate the wipers? Oh yes, the lights do come on automatically. All those windscreen sensors must be working.

As a side-line whilst waiting in the morning I'd figured out a small adjustment needed on the red car. It was a missing a software driver. No, not a person to drive it - a piece of software.

The little button on the steering wheel really does mean the car has an embedded Windows operating system for some of its functions. And, like a printer, there was a missing software driver. It's one of those things where a dealer would just say "it doesn't work with this model." I loaded the software and the missing function started up. When did it get so complex?

It shows what a few minutes of imposed down time can do. More productively, it's given me a chance to plan a new mini-project. But more of that later.