Nightmare day!!

Driving into work this morning, I was just coming off the M60 to take the main road into Manchester, when all of a sudden I lost control of my steering and was struggling to stay on the slip road. Then as I left the motorway, I could suddenly feel every bump in the road, so pulled over to find one of my back tyres had blown out! So I had to get out in the pouring rain to change my tyre at the side of the road – which isn’t something I’m particularly skilled in(!) – so that I could actually get into work!

Usual day in the office really, and I had arranged to take a tape that Colin needed for the weekend up to Middleton (Sarah had asked me for it a couple of days ago and I was meeting her there so she could pass it on to him), so thought that if I left about quarter to seven, I’d be able to get there before 7.30 which was before they were all going out. So I get to the car park to find I’d left my lights on and the battery was totally flat – and it was still chucking it down! :o( I was pretty annoyed with myself ‘cos I new I was up against it time-wise, but I gave Simon Malia a call, who I knew was on his way down from the office to the car park, and since I knew he had some jump leads, asked him if he could give me a boost to my battery. Fine so far. Next, Simon brings his car over, and we start to connect up the jump leads. We followed the instructions to the letter, but when we tried to connect the final lead to my battery, for some reason there were loads of sparks generated, more than I’ve seen before when I’ve jump started my car in the past.

Anyway, I got into my car to try and start the engine, but when I turned the key, I got absolutely nothing – not even weak lights on the dashboard which I thought was pretty odd. Getting back out of the car, we suddenly noticed smoke coming from both batteries, and it continued to get worse. We both ran as fast as we could away from the cars, knowing that if they were to burst into flames, both cars could go up! Incredibly stressed(!), I got onto the phone to the fire brigade – which seemed to take ages to get through to – ‘cos I just had a vision of both cars bursting into flames! A fire engine eventually arrived, but luckily by then, one of the jump leads had melted through, so the circuit was broken before a fire could actually start. One of the fireman disconnected the leads, and basically both leads had melted to become one! There was no obvious damage to my car, but there was slight smoke damage to Simon’s car – and the firemen managed to get both started again – after pushing mine around the car park to bump start it(!)… The whole thing really shook me up though – I thought that was going to be the end of my Fiesta!

They say bad luck comes in threes, and today’s certainly no exception. As I pulled into my road, and started to reverse into a parking space, I managed to clip the rear wing of someone’s car, putting a nice dent in both mine and theirs. So that’s an insurance claim against me as well! :o(

All in all, a pretty bad day. And I still haven’t been able to deliver this tape!!