Tuesday 5 April 2016

Glass half full

Over Easter my washing machine broke down. It kept cutting out. I phoned Bosch and it took ages to get hold of someone - well it was Easter I suppose. 4 phone calls and still no date for an engineer.

I was tearing my hair out and handwashing was beginning to get me down.

On 29th March I was Edinburgh and called in to John Lewis and decided I couldn't stand it any longer so would suss out a new machine. There was the one I liked and it cost £395. Stuff it, I thought, I can't do without a washing machine for a day longer. That was when the very helpful salesman told me that the first delivery date was 19th April. I'm sure you can guess what I said to that?!

I immediately went back to where I was staying and phoned Bosch again. And this time I had some joy. They would be out to fix my machine on Monday 4th and it would cost me £95 + any parts needed. Well that, at least, was better than 19th and cost a whole lot less.

Yesterday the Bosch repair man duly came. He took the back off my machine, put his digital thingy into the right places and announced that the machine was fine, it was the plug socket that was at fault and he plugged the machine into another socket and there it was... working fine. He then took my credit card and there I was £95 down.

I phoned Steve from round the corner and asked him if he could sort the socket and, 10 minutes later, he was taking the socket apart. He pronounced it dead and zoomed off to Earlston to buy a new one, zoomed back, sorted it and it cost me £15 and a severe slap on the wrist for not calling him first.

I could have spitted feathers at the loss of the £95, but I decided to look at it slightly differently. Actually it saved me £300 (from buying a new one) or, to put it another way, the machine is 4 years old and, with Steve's £15 in too, that makes the cost actually £27.50 per year. Not so bad really.

Glass half full? Yup that's me!




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