Worse Than Child Birth!

Daisy Turnip writes.....

Today daughter’s car went for its first MOT! Daughter had never previously experienced:-

1. The process of sending a car in for an MOT
2. Waiting to get the car back whilst it is in for and MOT and
3. The tiniest fear / thought that it might fail the MOT and that she might be using public transport on a regular basis!

She also needed / wanted to get the car back this afternoon in order to get back to uni tonight, because she has an exam tomorrow morning.

I had meetings both this morning and this afternoon.

I came out of this morning’s meeting to find 5 missed calls, 1 voice mail message and 2 text messages – all from daughter!

OMG I thought, the car has failed the MOT with catastrophic proportions! I rang daughter and she told me, it had failed on the emissions test and needed a new exhaust. I told her to ring the garage and approve the work and I’d leave work early, pick her up and drive to the garage to collect the car and do the dutiful bank of mom and dad duties ie pay the chuffing bill!

At 2pm I went into another meeting. I came out at 3.30 to find 3 missed calls, 1 voice mail message and 2 more text messages – again, all from daughter!

I rang daughter to see what the problem was. She informed me, she’d rang the garage every half an hour to see if the car was ready. It wasn’t! They had been waiting for delivery of the exhaust and therefore still needed to complete the exhaust fit and then take it for a drive to check on a problem she’d asked them to check re the tyre tracking!

The poor garage – daughter on the phone every half hour! I really did want to give them a call myself, just to sympathise with them and also say, ‘welcome to my world’ – see how they like it! But I didn’t! Because I'm not smug! : )

I fled from work at 4.15pm (this in itself is a bit of a miracle) and did my usual 1 ½ half journey in 45 minutes! Picked up daughter, who then began to interrogate me about: how good is an MOT; is it really safe the drive the car all the way back to uni; do they really know what they are doing; why don’t they think there is a problem with the tracking; is an exhaust system really that expensive; why would an exhaust system break; is it normal for an exhaust to ‘die’; are they ‘ripping’ us off; am I worried about the cost; do you think it will fail next year’s MOT; will it impact on the insurance cost....... blah de blah de blah................... I really should have put my iPod on, it would have been so much more less painful.

We collected the car, I paid the bill, daughter put her bag in the boot (correction, I put her bag in the boot) and she went off to uni. I jumped back in the car and slammed my foot on the accelerator and got the hell out of there ASAP. Questions, questions, questions, it’s just all too much!

Next year I’m going to tell her to just sort it herself and send me the bill!