My car is still not all right.
I am driving it, not at the moment, obviously, at the moment I am sitting peaceably on the taxi rank hoping to get this finished before anybody else interrupts me. When I have got a customer I can drive it, it will still start and stop, but it keeps slipping into Limp Home Mode, by which I mean that it won’t accelerate very much and doesn’t do very well when faced with hills.
This is something of a disadvantage in the Lake District. We have a lot of hills.
So far none of my customers seem to have noticed, which is one of the advantages of all of them being drunk. One customer almost noticed, when it slowed down remarkably on its way up the hill out of Bowness, but I just pretended that I had forgotten where he lived, and so it was all right.
I do not know what is the matter with it, it is a Technical Matter. Mark thinks that some sensor is faulty, but has not yet worked out which one. It is a complete nuisance but not nearly as bad as it would be if we had very many customers, which we haven’t.
I am quite certain that Mark will fix it in the end. He keeps changing the things that he thinks it might be, and it keeps getting a little tiny bit better all the time, but it is not its usual enthusiastic self, and it is making the evening a bit tiresome.
We will get it sorted out in the end. It is one of those things that happens when you are on a wing and a prayer and not very much funding, I am sure it could have been averted if we had given a garage with a high-tech fault detector a thousand pounds, but we didn’t, and so we have got Mark and his best guess.
Sooner or later I am sure that his guess will turn out to be right.
In the meantime I am also wrestling with another piece of novelty technology, which is that we have reluctantly given in to the onrushing tides of the modern world and agreed to accept card payments. I have stood out hard against this for several years now, because of being determined not to be compelled to pay the three percent charge that the card machines demand, but there are so few customers at the moment that we can’t afford to lose even a single one, and so we have given in.
In fact some investigation has led us to the discovery that the world has moved on apace since we first considered card machines. We have managed, acting on the sage advice of our cheerily enthusiastic computer-based assistant Chat GPT, to find a card machine company that is charging us nothing at all.
I couldn’t quite believe that this would be possible, but it is true. We have not even needed to purchase a card machine. All we need is our telephones. People wave their cards at my telephone and it takes their money out of their banks, with a happy shower of green sparks as if it were doing something lovely with fairy dust, which from my point of view it is.
If we do not then transfer the fairy-dust money into our bank, but simply save it up in our telephones, it costs us nothing at all. We have got telephones stuffed full of cash, and when we buy petrol we can just wave them at the till and the lady says Thank You Very Much.
I tried this tonight, rather cautiously. I was fully expecting her to say Oh No You Don’t You Rascal, but she didn’t.
Our bank doesn’t get involved in the whole shenanigans in the least.
We are hoping that it will improve our fortunes.
The oil industry still does not seem to be in need of Mark to go rushing off to Aberdeen to do any emergency oil rig repairs, so probably it is just as well.
We will just have to keep going and hope that things improve.
My dress is coming on nicely, by the way.
