This time last week, I was mentally preparing myself to return to the UK. My ferry was all booked for the Friday evening. Then the car decided to misfire. Just a couple of times when cold. The symptoms appeared to be as if I had switched off the ignition momentarily. The following morning (Thursday) it died on me. And I had twenty four hours before setting out for Caen.
So, we called the breakdown service. The trouble with electronic systems in cars is that there is little for the amateur mechanic to look at and the messages were all conflicting anyway. I suspected something electronic but was out of my depth. Calling the breakdown service was an experience in itself. I hate menu systems when calling a UK number. Trying to catch the French rattled at me at high speed was just too much. I had to ask a neighbour to navigate it for me.
I have to say that I was impressed. We are in rural France and the breakdown engineer was with us in pretty short order – about 45 minutes. There was some humming and hahing, which seems to happen with breakdown chappies the world over. Eventually, he put his jump box across the battery and it fired up. So, that was it; the battery. Well, why didn’t it behave like a failed battery? I’ve had enough batteries fail in my years of riding and driving and this was nothing like a battery failing. Still, he decided to take it into Lodève to get a new battery fixed. A couple of hours later, having heard nothing, we called the garage who wondered what was going on. So we went in Mrs L’s car and waited while they changed the battery.
All of this delayed my packing somewhat. At about seven in the evening, I fired up the laptop to transfer some files over from the desktop ready for the off, when it hung. I rebooted. It hung again. I just couldn’t get Windows to load. Going into safe mode worked okay, but in normal mode it wasn’t playing.
So, that was it, start again and reload everything.
I postponed my ferry booking for 24 hours and spent the Friday rebuilding the PC.
Having arrived in the UK, Mrs L tells me that the hard drive on the desktop has keeled over and died.
Technology; who needs it?
Has anything been going on in the meantime?