Moved in to Windsor
New house, no DSL, this will get posted (and backdated) when I get my computer back online.
I've moved in, bought a car, obtained insurance, bought all the little things you need to maintain a new apartment (cleaning products, salt & pepper, olive oil - you know, the essentials), run countless errands over the last 3 days, and feel quite satisfied with myself. Now I'm sitting at my new dining room table, and trying to draw lessons from the experience, and I don't know if it's the horrible speed at which it's all gone, or the the fact that I'm halfway through my second whisky, but I'm finding it hard to feel very happy about the experience.
The positive, of course, is that Windsor is a lovely town, and that I'm likely to make lots of new friends over the coming months. Unfortunately, the nitty gritty of the experiences I've endured over the last 3 days, most particularly the purchase of the car, fall into that category that makes you less naive and more jaded, and I find myself somewhat attached to my naivete these days, so I resent such experiences because of their gradual encroachment on the little nugget of childlike innocence I have left.
I realised, as I ran all over Berkshire tracking down one advertiser after another, that in today's world, especially when you're doing something like buying a second-hand car, you can afford to trust nobody. Everyone is trying to sell the car for more than it's worth. This is expected. Everyone quotes a dishonest price and expects you to negotiate it down, but is hoping for a sucker. Everyone's holding a deck of cards and hoping you fall for their bluff. It's very draining operating in this kind of environment, but worse than that, it's unnecessary.
When all's said and done, cars are on average sold for the right second-hand price. Occasionally, individual exchanges go through where someone (either the buyer or the seller) gets conned. Ultimately though, the averages ring true, despite the fact that some people overpay and others get rich taking advantage of that. It saddens me immensely that there are people who live in this space where someone gets conned and someone wins. It angers me that such a large proportion of car traders are dishonest about the value of the cars that they sell - because this is somehow perceived as OK by society, and therefore expected - that you can't trust a bloody thing they say. They are, after all, car dealers.
In the end, I had a choice of 3 cars. The one I chose (a little VW Golf) won out not because it was better value (although it may have been, I'm no great judge of these things), nor because it had all it's papers (although it did) and service history (that too), but because I trusted the man I bought it from, because he seemed like a nice guy. What bothers me even more is that I'm not so great a judge of character than I am necessarily right about him being honest, but I saw something that seemed familiar in him: he replied to questions the same way I might have, with implicit honesty, showing the problems the car had to make sure that I walked away feeling well treated rather than ill-used. Maybe he's a better actor than the others, I still have to ask him about why the airbag warning light is permanently on, but ultimately, his forthrightness is what won me over.
And I like VWs, that helps.
In another episode of the moving mini-saga, less than 24 hours after I moved in, the gas company accidentally cut the gas mains leading to my apartment. Actually it's a bit more complicated than that. Such is modern life. The gas UTILITY company (not supplier) that maintains the pipes, SUBCONTRACTED another company to do some work that involved cutting a mains and replacing it with a new one. They rerouted all the apartment's gas supplies to the new mains but accidentally missed 2 of them, then filled the old mains with plastic filler before cutting it into little pieces and pulling it out of the ground.
So now I have no gas, which means no stove and no heating.
In Winter. Which, in England, is grey, overcast and cold.
A bit like summer, really.
Regardless, after 6 or 7 phone calls, I've been told it will be reconnected around 10:30 tomorrow morning, so I'm going to bed fully dressed tonight.
It's amazing how we take things like a gas supply for granted. Not only am I freezing because mine has been cut (and it would be worse if I wasn't in a building where the apartments around me are all heated), but they've claimed they can fix it in 24 hours. That's pretty impressive - they're going to go under the road, and splice the main line to reattach my supply line to the mains in under 24 hours. I don't even know what that involves, and wouldn't know where to start if I were asked to do it myself, but the man on the phone tells me it's no problem.
How competent. I'm very impressed.
In the meantime, I'm still freezing.
UPDATE : They had to dig up the back garden, find two pipes going through the wall (apparently, they problem is that they're modern, and therefore plastic, and therefore hard to detect). It took them most of the day, but they finally got my gas connected again at around 9pm. Amen to the end of that saga.
Posted by nlvp at December 14, 2004 12:37 PM