One Elephant, Two Elephants...

Keep counting and breathe deeply. I should be happy. Thame Crash Repair - the company that are repairing my car -  told me that my car would be ready on Tuesday 16th September. Wonderful, I thought. This is the end of driving a hire car that has cost the insurance company over £90 a day for the last seven weeks. I went into planning mode and rearranged the planned service on my car. I found there was no way I could get the MOT done at the same garage on the same day. This meant involving more planning and I needed to let the car hire company know that I was returning their car. 

It only took me about ten phone calls to co-ordinate this. Then I was told on Monday that the car wouldn't be ready on Tuesday. It would be ready on Wednesday. Again I went through the process of rearranging and co-ordinating getting the crash repair place to deliver the car to the garage for its service, for the car rental people to pick the car up the following day and for the other garage to postpone the MOT for one more day. All this took time. 

Things are never simple and a little human intervention from the various companies involved would have made my ordeal much easier. I got an email demanding the return of the hire car on 15th September. I called them again and told them this had already been sorted. I got nasty emails and a phone call from the Toyota dealership saying I had missed my service appointment. No I hadn't. I told them I had to cancel. That was not the only phone call I got from them confusing the planning. On top of that, my insurance company threatened to cancel my policy because they had no driving data from me. This was the second warning. I contacted them previously, got an apology and then they sent another warning out. I scored well over 80/100 when I was driving. I had the numbers to prove I was a good driver and still they were nasty to me. 

I was told I could collect my car on Thursday!!! With excitement and purpose I got ready to pick up my car. I got to the garage and it wasn't there. It hadn't been delivered from the repair company. Eventually I did pick it up by the close of play on Thursday though and as a sympathy note, my garage did the MOT despite saying they couldn't. Then I needed to apologise to the MOT garage for mucking them around. This is but a small summary of my ordeal. The more mundane bits have been omitted. I won't tell you what I had to go through to update everyone of my new timings. So why the delay? Well, the crash repair team ordered the trim for the passenger side and received the trim for the driver's side more than once. This small bit of stupidity has cost the insurance company so much more because of delays caused by error. Errrh. 

I am going through similar frustrations with HMRC. I joined a webinar to learn about the new developments -  MTD - Making Tax Digital. I then had a look at the suggested software I'll need to use. This has to be compliant with the HMRC and cover all the areas I receive income from. So far I haven't found one that fits my needs. Then I went to sign up as a user to get used to the new procedure. That part of the HMRC website is currently not working. OMG HMRC WTF! MTD - Making Things Difficult.

Keeping breathing deeply... one elephant, two elephants, three eleph...

...at least the village school September fair was relatively dry...

...and loads of fun