Fuel crisis? What fuel crisis. I’m driving around in a car that does 50pmg.
Well, it said 50 on the gauge when I bought it from the nice City worker from New Zealand, and he was driving it up and down the vertiginous slopes of Forest Hill.
Within days of me owning it, and driving it up and down the distinctly flat A3, it was averaging 46.
Now, let’s put this in perspective. I was averaging 26mpg in the Volvo. I used to dream of 27. Wild, fevered dreams I had, in which I became the only Volvo driver in history to get 27. But the best I ever got out of it was 26.9 — on the last day I drove it, ironically.
So, in a way, Aviva did me a favour by slapping a huge insurance premium on me after my phantom crash, because then I had to get a more sensible run-around.
I fell in love with the Panda when I saw the mpg reading. I took it home with all sorts of unhealthy expectations of it. I quickly became obsessed with the workings of its dinky little fuel gauge. Since the day I bought it, I’ve been watching the needle compulsively, getting distraught every time it budges.
As for the mpg monitor, I’m mesmerised by it. I keep nearly crashing because I can’t stop staring at it. I drive along in a semi-hypnotic state mumbling ‘47. 47.3. Go on. Go on.’ The Panda is obviously doing its best and no doubt feels the weight of my disappointment.
‘What am I doing wrong?’ I wailed to the boyfriend, as I slumped in front of the steering wheel after returning home to find my finishing average a distressing 44mpg. ‘What am I doing different to the man from New Zealand?’
‘Keep the revs down,’ he said. But I can’t keep them down any more. I’m barely moving. I’ve got horses running past me on the fields next to the A3. An alpaca overtook me near Claygate yesterday.
The boyfriend did the tyre pressures, and fixed a small blow in the exhaust. But still I can’t get it up to 50.
I find myself driving from Balham to Cobham nursing mad thoughts about how I might achieve optimum fuel economy.
As I approach the turn-off to where I keep my horses, I think, ‘What if I just keep going.’
Like one half of Thelma and Louise, I fantasise about going all the way, possibly to Guildford and beyond.
I figure that if I just drive and drive at 60mph the mpg will eventually hit 50.
I am, in other words, willing to expend fuel in order to prove that I am conserving it.
Luckily, I was brought up short by a call from the Aviva Customer Experience Manager’s office. The Aviva Customer Experience Manager herself was too busy to call. But it turns out she has a team of people who ring customers on her behalf to manage their experience.
This one rang to tell me they had noticed I had renewed my premium. ‘Can we take it that this means you are now satisfied with the outcome of your complaint?’ she said, nervously.
I didn’t want to be rude to her. ‘Look, you’re obviously a very nice person,’ I said, ‘and I’m sure you will have read my file before making this call. So you will know I’ve had to buy a new car in order to afford insurance because you upped my premium to over a thousand pounds because of an accident I can prove never happened. So you will know I’m not satisfied.’
‘Yes, I understand that,’ she said. ‘But can I say you’re satisfied with the outcome of the complaints procedure?’
It turns out that Aviva is no longer concerned about why I became unhappy. What they want to know is whether I can be described as happy with the way my unhappiness has been handled. I told her I really couldn’t distinguish between the two things. She asked me repeatedly to please try. She gave me every impression that if I didn’t come up with a way of quantifying my happiness with the way Aviva had addressed my unhappiness she would never leave me alone. Possibly she might have to call me back at regular intervals for years to come until I found it within myself to start quantifying my levels of happiness with my unhappiness.
‘I’m really not happy with any of it,’ I told her.
In the end, she declared that she would be passing my complaints about the way my complaints had been handled to someone else who would look into those complaints, with a view to generating a new complaint about my complaint about the way my complaint had been handled.
I may have to complain about this.
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