h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just went to take my car in for a service this morning and as I was waiting for the garage to open I sat in the car listening to the radio...

...whereupon it cut out and suddenly the battery was dead as a post. Nothing doing with the ignition save for that rather feeble and depressing clicking sound one gets with a flat battery.

"Timing!" I thought. If it's going to break down then outside the garage where they can repair it - and where I have an appointment - is the place to do it.**

It turns out the radio was badly wired in by Halfords when I bought it and has been draining the battery even when apparently off the whole time I've owned it. This was *four* years ago.

Furthermore I managed to leave the internal light on all night a few weeks back and it still worked no problem until today.

Now - although it may be in a bad way today - that's what I call a sound battery all round. The garage have given it a clean bill of health too. So it's just £25 to rewire the radio properly rather than a new alternator which is what I feared.

Shame the front brakes need doing - that's bumped the bill up to a healthy £400. But it could have been so much worse.
Also a slow puncture in one of the tyres has been identified as repairable so the £300 I was bracing myself for to replace the tyres has disappeared too.

So £400 that could maybe have been £1000 - not a bad result overall.


** I have previously been lucky this way. My old car broke down a few years back in Birmingham and I had to get the bus to work. When I came out of work it was to find the entire city in gridlock due to an 'unexpected' amount of snow. Many drivers took in excess of 5 hours to get home that night (if they managed it at all).
I was rather glad I didn't have my car that day in the end.