You see we had to take our car in for a repair. This was the good bit because we scraped in - just - to get it done under warranty. Off we went just after 9:00 AM to drop it off and pick up a loan car until it's fixed which is supposed to be by next Tuesday. The car was a keyless one which was a bit of a challenge for Pisces at the beginning but after a bit of practice he felt confident and away we went to do a few errands in the same area as the car dealership.
At the first stop we locked it using the remote, went in and got what we needed and when we came out found the boot (the trunk for those of you in other parts of the world) wouldn't open more than about 30 or so centimetres. Damn. We tried everything we could think of and nothing worked but we were still close to the dealership so we decided to go back there since obviously it was not going to be ideal if this wasn't accessible. It turned out to be a simple fix that they just hadn't shown us when we picked it up.
Great. So we put our shopping in the boot and off we went again this time a few suburbs away to Ikea where we wanted a step stool for the grandchildren to use in the bathroom. We parked - by now Pisces was quite comfortable with handling all of its new fancy systems - and tried to lock it with the remote. Nothing happened. We tried to open the boot with the remote, also nothing. Dang! We wondered if it might be the area - we'd heard there'd been remote control issues in that area before - so off we went about half a kilometre to another carpark. Nope, the locking system still did not work and the boot wouldn't open. Back we go to the dealership and there it worked. Dammit.
"Oh, yes," they said. "There can be problems in the carparks in that area. Would you like another car?" Well, we were definitely not going back there now since it was nearly noon by then so we said "no, thanks" and put our shopping in the boot. That was a big mistake as we soon discovered when we got closer to home, stopped at another shopping centre and - you've guessed, haven't you - it didn't work again.
Back we went to the dealer and this time got another car (which operates with a standard key locking remote). They managed to extract our shopping from the first one and home we went. By the time we got there it was 1:00 PM and we both had tension headaches but this car works exactly as it should. It even fits in our garage. Phew. While it's unlikely we'll be getting a new car any time soon - our cars last on average 15-20 years and this one is only six years old - we'd take a lot of convincing to even consider one with a whizzbang state of the art keyless operating system after this experience. Yes, I do know we were probably just unlucky to get one that had developed an intermittent fault but why tempt fate.
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