Halfords Disaster

What should have been an easy day today, ended up being a bit of a disaster. I have my Chemo today and didn’t want to do much apart from rest. Unfortunately I needed a new headlight bulb for my car. So I thought I would drive down the road to Halfords and get them to fit the bulb for me. While I’m there I thought I might as well get them to check my oil and Coolant. I have also had a bit of problem with my rear wiper arm being a bit loose and I asked if they could tighten that up as well. That I way I could get all of the little jobs done for me in one go, as I don’t have the energy to do any of them at the moment.

The fitting of the bulb went ok, although I little bit of struggle as usual as there isn’t much room to play around to get the bulb in. The young lad managed it in the end though. When I say young lad, he was about 20 I think! (sign of getting old).  While he had he tools there he had a look at the rear wiper arm for me. Flipped up the cap on the top to get to the nut and used his socket set on it to tighten it up. He asked me to try it and I said ‘yep it seems fine’, but he wanted to tighten it a bit more. So he asked if I could hold the blade while he tightened it to stop it moving and began to turn more. I bet you can guess what happened next! As he was turning it was going through my head that he seemed to be turning more than he should. He wasn’t using a ratchet, he just kept turning. Sure enough. SNAP, He broke the spindle and the nut came of with the other bit in it!!

He didn’t know what to say or do. So I suggested he goes and speaks to someone inside and asks for advice. He came back and said he has spoken to his manager and could I go inside to fill out some forms.

To cut a really long story short,  they can’t fix it today because they have to get the part from Toyota. After talking to the Toyota dealer it is going to cost them about £350 to fix it as they will need to get a new motor that has the spindle is part of. Because of the cost of the part it has to be authorised by Halfords head office, which the guy in the shop said would take about 7 days to sort out.

So a simple 10 minute trip to Halfords ended up taking me over an hour to sort out the problem and at least a week without any wiper blade on the rear of my car.

Apparently the young lad will get a slap on the wrists for snapping it. Hopefully he has learned a lesson and wont try that again.

I didn’t have the energy to argue or shout and scream, which is probably good for them. I had enough trouble just standing up and talking to them for that long. I gave him the key to go and get the details from the car himself as I couldn’t keep walking back and too to the car with him just to unlock it and lock it again while he got engine numbers etc.

So if the weather gets really bad and I can’t see out of the rear window while driving, I will just have to ask Charito to open the window, crawl out over the back and wipe the window for me.  Do you think that is safe at 70 miles an hour on the motorway?