The one about the wipers

• By Alison
• 30 December, 2009
• 1 Comment

I don’t love my car at all. In fact, I am pretty sure that the Renault megane scenic is about the worst car that I’ve ever been within 40 feet of. It’s certainly not very scenic.

I may have neglected to mention in my post about flying to Australia that we actually had problems getting to the airport in the first place. It was pouring rain and the wipers stopped working completely. It was impossible to drive with no wipers in that weather.

We ended up phoning streetcar, which is only possible because Mr Boxer Shorts has a work account with them. They had a car just a few streets away and the delay was only half an hour, so all in all it was pretty smooth.

But that doesn’t excuse our car from its appalling behaviour in the first place.

Mr Boxer Shorts pulled the front of the car apart and found the problem with the wipers, which he duly fixed. Or so we thought.

This morning we had a family dentist appointment over in Wimbledon Park. We like our dentist, so despite having moved to the other side of London, we still ramble back over there for dentist appointments. The girls and I took off in the car, with Mr BS following on the scooter.

We got as far as Streatham when the wipers stopped working. And of course, it was raining. What did you expect? It’s London.

I immediately phone Mr Boxer Shorts, but I didn’t expect him to hear the phone, since he was presumably en route in the scooter. Luckily for me, instead of following us, he’d taken a phone call at home and hadn’t even left yet. He jumped on the scooter and arrived in due time.

But we didn’t have any way of unscrewing the front part of the wiper housing, so his presence was really about as useful as a syphallitic tortoise at that point.

I got the fun job of walking up streatham high street and asking the shop owners of every open grocery store if they knew where I could get an allen key. Apparently none of them had any idea. I am not convinced the half of them understood what I was asking for actually. 

I phoned Mr Boxer Shorts and told him that I couldn’t find any, so he decided that he’d get back on the scooter and ride around looking for somewhere to buy them. But as I walked down the street I spotted one of those shops that sell almost everything, so I headed over.

They did indeed have allen keys, plus screwdrivers, so I got a set of each and tried to pay. But I had no cash on me (other than Australian fivers) and so needed to pay on the card. I had to bump the total up to over five pounds, so I came out with the allen keys, screwdrivers, and a muffin baking tray.

The allen keys turned out to not work – the reason why isn’t clear, but the net result was that Mr Boxer Shorts used the screwdrivers to levy the housing off without unscrewing it. Snapping plastic was heard. But we were in, and the arm of the wipers was re-attached to the mechanical driver. The screwdriver was also now shaped like a banana. That’s what you get when you spend £1.99 on a set of six screwdrivers! 

I phoned the dentist to let them know we were on our way, and we set off, all systems go.

Or not. 

It was only about two streets later that the wipers stopped again. I bipped the horn and pointed at the frozen wipers. There was little point in  trying to fix them, since it obviously didn’t work. So Mr BS let me pull up beside him at the next lights, and then he leaned over and manually moved the wipers. 

That’s how we drove on for the rest of the journey. Every set of lights he’d pull to the right and I’d slide in beside him for a bit of manual wipage. I also had to use a bathroom squeegee to wipe the inside windows because they keep fogging up and the heating has stopped working. The drivers window cannot be wound down as that’s been broken for months. (Have I told you how much I hate this car?)

We made it to the Dentist only about 10 minutes late.

The trouble is now that Mr BS is going to go straight to work on the scooter. I won’t have my mobile wiping assistant driving home with me! Where are those window cleaners who stand on street corners when you need them? One of those guys strapped to the roof would be perfect. Maybe not legal, but is that important?

So Mr Boxer Shorts showed me what I need to do to reattach the arm, and the girls and I set off home. I figured that I probably had a set number of wipes before the arm fell off, so I started to be very economical with my wiping. I let the visibility get to double blur before I would allow the wipers to do one wipe. 

That got me all the way to Herne Hill before the arm fell off. I stopped and reattached it, and continued. We only got as far as Penge, so rather than pull over and do the full fix again, I started getting out at the lights (when they were red that is) to manually push the wipers back and forth. This elicited a few strange looks too.

So as you can imagine, my car is not my friend. Does anyone want it? I am quite happy to swap it for a nice SAAB.