Another traumatic afternoon at Tesco

Alcohol related therapy

Regular readers of this blog will know that traumatic things happen to me at Tesco and at least partly because of this I generally avoid supermarkets like the plague, but this afternoon I had a very small weekly shop to do (Jim went to Afghanistan earlier in the week) and I also needed to fill the car with fuel before my petrol discount vouchers expired... so I went.

On the way to fill up, I momentarily panicked at the realisation that I had never filled this car up and had no idea what side the fuel cap was on, but fortunately the wise people at Volvo have designed an arrow on the dashboard which points to the side of the car you fill up on - phew! When I eventually got to the front of the queue for the pump another problem presented itself. Our newfangled car has a button which unlocks the fuel cap. Did I know where it was? Did I heck!

I was scrabbling around in the car inadvertently opening the bonnet, switching the hazard lights on, blindly pressing or switching anything that looked ambiguous. I came *this close* to driving off without the fuel.... and how I wish I had!

Eventually I popped the fuel cap open, I put £50 worth of petrol in and I went to close the cap. The cap was strangely difficult to wind in and after it fell out on first attempt I looked at it more closely. Quite closely actually. Close enough to see it had the words "diesel" written on it. In the 15 years I've been driving I've never owned, borrowed or driven a diesel car... except hang on! It turns out I do own a diesel car! How funny! How funny that this diesel car I didn't know I owned is here in this garage next to this pump that I just used to fill it with petrol.... oh b******s!!!!

I would like to pretend at this point that I laughed at my stupidity, efficiently dealt with the problem, kept a stiff upper lip and got on with the day. But no it was a packed Tesco garage, it was a dark Scottish evening, I had a baby with me and as soon as I got to the counter and told them my problem and they said "is there anyone we can call" I thought, my husband's in Afghanistan and I cried.

But moving on from the crying bit... what followed was a few phone calls, a lot of questions I didn't know the answer to (which garage did we buy it from? Did we have breakdown cover?) and some lovely very helpful complete strangers.

It also turns out that you can't move our newfangled car out of "park" without starting the engine and you can't start the engine when you've just put the wrong sort of expensive liquid in it. Brilliant. So now my quite-large-not-at-all-inconspicuous car was grounded in the middle of the Tesco garage on a busy Saturday night and we couldn't do as much as push it out of the way.

In the middle of one of the phone calls with the questions I didn't know the answer to, I noticed a woman of about my age seemed to be patiently waiting to talk to me and because military wives have a sixth sense that allows them to instantly detect another military wife, I knew that (1) she was a military wife and (2) she had worked out that I was a military wife. I got off the phone and she said "I live on the patch (forces slang for housing area) is there anything I can do" Yes, yes and yes!!

So we came home, she gave me tea (how terribly British) and we called out a garage. 45 minutes later the car has been whisked away by a tow truck, Theo was in bed and I had cracked open the alcohol.

Now the ironic things...

(1) Two hours before the Tesco incident I called our insurance company to cancel the policy on our second car, which I have put in storage because there is no way that one person could need two cars for the next 5 months.
(2) I didn't have a peep out of Theo all afternoon, despite being shuffled from car to car and in and out of the Tesco garage - to him it was the most exciting afternoon he has ever had.
(3) After all the drama and the expensive fuel which will be poured away, I forgot to use the petrol discount vouchers in the end any way.... Grrr!