Traffic jammed

I had a meeting to go to in Glasgow last night. I and my colleague Guillermo set out from work at just after 5pm, reaching the Edinburgh City Bypass (A720) at Straiton Junction just about 5.30pm. The meeting was a stone's throw from M8 Junction 16 and, even at that time of night, shouldn't have taken more than about an hour to get to.

It was slow on the bypass, but within about 15 minutes we were onto the M8. Here we hit the first queue. I know it often queues between Hermiston Gait and Junction 2 at that time of night, so I wasn't too bothered. However, the queue extended the whole way to Livingston at Junction 3. So we passed Livingston at about 6:15pm, knowing we'd be a bit late for the meeting, but not that concerned. Then we hit what turned out to be the big queue. From Junction 3A to the middle of the roadworks after Junction 5 (about 10 miles) took about an hour. My new car can tell you all sorts of information about your journey - as we passed Harthill I noticed that my average speed for the whole journey was only 17mph. At Kirk O' Shotts the traffic flow stopped altogether. For half an hour. Average speed for the trip reduced to 13mph.

About 10 cars ahead of us, two 'motorway maintenance' trucks blocked the road. It turned out they had been repairing a hole in the carriageway which had (obviously) been slowing the traffic down for hours. So, at ten to eight, we emerged from the queue onto a totally clear road, but there was no point in continuing to the meeting. We were still 25 minutes away from the venue and there was only about half an hour of meeting left. So we went home.

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And as if that wasn't enough, my digibox failed to record Heroes on BBC3 last night (or rather it mysteriously stopped recording about 10 minutes into it), so I've a whole week to wait for the next episode. Bah!

Called by the fuzz

On Thursday I bought a new (to me) car. I traded in my old Mondeo as part exchange. Last night (Friday) I went to bed early. About an hour and a half into my sleep I was rudely awakened by a noise which I couldn't quite figure out what it was. I listened for a bit before I realised that it was actually the phone. I must have been in a deep sleep. It rung off before I got there, but started ringing again before I got back to bed.

"Good evening sorry to call you so late is that Dr Carvel and are you the registered keeper of X-ray 7-9-8 Romeo Sierra Sierra?" came the punctuationless stream of words down the phone.

"Erm, huh?"

"X-ray 7-9-8 Romeo Sierra Sierra?"

"Yes, that was my car. I traded it in on Thursday..."

And so on. It turned out that this was the police and that my car had been stolen. My old car, that is. Which had probably been sitting out the back of a garage in central Edinburgh, probably with the keys in the ignition. The police had pulled the car over and - for some reason - were suspicious that the driver was not the owner. But did they really have to call me after midnight to find out if I was the owner?

So I went back to bed. And lay awake worrying, quite irrationally, that my new car was somehow more at risk of being stolen... Thankfully its still there this morning.

Used car salesmen

I went to the garage to buy one of these (see right) today. A one year old VW Touran. I had previously visited the VW main dealer and priced up the car that I wanted, but on the website of Arnold Clark garage, the same car comes in significantly cheaper, so I went there to see what they could offer.

While they could offer a couple of Tourans which I had a look at on their forecourt, what they couldn't offer was customer service.

I had been impressed by the sales-manner of the guy in the VW garage, he had been nice, approachable and had offered me slightly over the odds on a trade in on my current car against the 56 plate Touran. The guy at Arnold Clark on the other hand just complained the entire time and completely refused to even hint at a trade in price for my current car. Without that vital bit of information I was unable to decide whether to buy from them or from the main dealer. It seems that Arnold Clark will only give you a trade-in price for your old car once you have committed to buying a new car from them. How useless is that?

Oh, and I wanted a blue car. They had several on their website but when I asked in the showroom they said they couldn't find any blue ones. And the showroom prices are completely unrelated to the online prices.

In the end I gave up on them and went and bought a car from the VW dealer. OK, I might have ended up paying a small percentage of the cost more there, but at least the service was good (and they had a blue one). If the pre-sales service is bad at Arnold Clark, I have no confidence at all regarding their after-sales service.