Roger the kitchen shopping volunteer borrowed the work wagon to do the shopping today – and wished he’d taken his own car like he usually does. Having just loaded all the groceries into the back, he couldn’t get the wagon started. Flat battery.
Another volunteer Ailsa went to his rescue. Roger was in a tizzy because his daughter was in the labour ward having her first child and he wanted to get going. So Ailsa collected Roger, dropped him back to his car then went back to the shopping centre to wait for RACQ.
The fun continued – RACQ jump-started the wagon and said it would be ok as long as Ailsa kept the engine running and let it charge back up. She drove it straight back to work, I jumped in while the engine was still running and we drove straight back to collect Ailsa’s car.
We’d almost got back to the shopping centre and hit traffic lights. Lights turned green and the car conked out on a busy road! Luckily we managed to push it around the corner and out of the traffic. Even luckier, as we were pushing the car the same RACQ guy spotted us as he was finished another job. We’d just pulled over and next moment he was pulling up in front of us. Terrific timing.
He gave the car another jump start, I let Ailsa off to her car and she followed me back to work without further incident. Batteries don’t like the heat apparently and ours died. I jumped on the phone then and arranged for a new one, the store Battery World came out within the hour and installed for us. Funnily enough, I’d found the store via Google, and the owner who came out said that they were in their second day of trading and we were their first call-out customer!
Reads like a Frank Spencer script… anything that could go wrong, did!