That’s all Folks!
Lordy, Lordy. I haven’t posted for 10 days! Well, as you know, it’s been a little busy round here of late.
Right then, as of now (as far as I’m currently inclined) all build projects are closed for this year. It’s getting too cold and I’m far too tired to do anything else. Exterminator and I finally completed those TARDIS castings and just in the nick of time too, then while he swanned off to beautiful Italy, I had the wonderful task of making the delivery with the help of another friend – and what a day that was!
11:30am last Friday, I went to pick up the van that I ordered from the rental garage. I got there and the van that they brought round for me was far too small to fit the pieces in! I told them that when I booked the van, I confirmed with the agent THREE times (and got her to make a note of this on the booking form) that the van should be capable of taking a load that is 240cm (8′) long by 120cm (4′) wide. What did we have here? A van that could just about take something that was 183cm (6′) by 105cm (3’6″) – absolutely marvelous! Thing is, they said that they had no other vans available, but I explained that I needed it “today” as this was the final deadline and it couldn’t be delivered any later – people were waiting for this item to arrive.
Luckily (I use the term loosely) they came up with another van and brought it round for me. Umm, it was the same make and model as the other one, so naturally it’d be the same size and just as useless to me. I have to say that I was now getting very worried, though I kept my cool and did explain that the nature of this problem was the company’s doing and not mine, I booked a van for today and thus I would like the van I ordered please. I ended up going around to their yard where they store the vehicles and what did I see? Two large vans that would be just the job, I’ll take one of those then. Well, the issue with them was that one was in need of repair and the other didn’t have its tax disk – though it was actually taxed. That’s the one I’ll have then, the disk issue was their problem, not mine.
I thanked them for sorting this right old mess out and as a bonus for all the hassles I incurred, they charged me at a reduced rate for the hire and said that when I bring the vehicle back, I didn’t have to top the fuel tank up. How decent of them. At least these guys tried their best to sort out the mess created by the booking department, something that was nothing to do with them in the first place.
The problems didn’t end there, but let’s just say that the entire day was cursed from the get-go. I had to be at the delivery point for 7pm, however, we encountered three major traffic jams which put us several hours behind schedule. Then just as we were approaching an area of the country that I’m not too familiar with, the sat-nav ran out of battery power. I hadn’t realised that the adaptor port in the dash had blown a fuse and thus wasn’t delivering any charge to the unit, so we were going strictly off the internal battery power. The rest of the journey was completed thanks to google maps and my mate’s clever little mobile phone – thank goodness that he was with me, otherwise I’d have been totally screwed!
The final lap had two motorway junctions closed, so we were going further off course, then when we found our way back to the general area, it was in the middle of no-where, pitch black and so we were homing in on the delivery point by trial and error. At one point, we very nearly sunk into a boggy hole when we took a wrong turn and ended up driving down what seemed to be a farm lane!
I think it was at some point around 11pm that we arrived. The van was unloaded, I gave a walk through of the parts to my client and then left to go home. The journey back was just as fun and I walked through my door at 5:30am the next morning. I didn’t even get to have any sleep because within half an hour of getting into bed, the kids were up, wide awake and wanted to see Daddy as they missed him. How could I say no to them, so I got up again. All day long, I walked around like a zombie – even my wife could see that I was totally “zonked” – though the big clue may have been at about 6pm when I was laying face down on the living room carpet, not moving a muscle as two young children were using me as a playground climbing frame. At this point, I just didn’t give a flying Hooray-Henry about the pain being inflicted on my person by the little tykes.
It was a relatively early bedtime for me that Saturday and very welcome it was too!
So there you have it, another little adventure over and done with, now I can relax without having to worry about completing workloads for clients as a doom laden deadline looms over me. Hells bells – two fibre glass TARDISes built in the space of four months. I’ll tell you this, if I see another big blue box with a light on top any time soon, I’ll probably explode. Oh, I spoke too soon…
BOOM!
sounds like your in need of that italian holliday ,job satisfaction tho
how do you feel about making 1/5 2 foot TARDS ,only kidding
How do I feel about making you a little TARDIS? Well, to answer that, here’s a well known phrase that’s been jumbled up. See if you can work out what it is.
Nelly on not Sunshine your.
And then you lived to tell the tale. Did you go in a coma for a couple of days?
Going into a coma would have been nice, but no. I did go to bed early to try and catch up though.
Sounds like a right old adventure…glad you got it sorted in the end
Yeah, I’m glad too – it was a long old day that day, but worth it in the end. One year plus in the planning after an initial “false start” that all went a bit pear shaped the first time around, but now finally it’s over. Phew!