Another Week, Another Rant

Another week to rant about.  And once again the root cause of my ranting is automotive.  You'd think that having spent what felt like half of the previous week being serviced and receiving a new MoT certificate, my car would be in the prime of health.  But apparently not.  The alternator packed up midweek, taking the battery with it - a cataclysm that cost me an arm and a leg to have sorted out, not to mention the massive disruption to my working week.  But that wasn't the worst of it.  Being a Ford, if the car's radio is disconnected from its power source, (when, for instance, you change the battery), when it is reconnected, it demands a security code before you can use it again.  The bloody thing won't even let you reset the clock to the correct time.  Of course, like most people who buy a car second hand, I don't have that four digit code.  To obtain it, you have to remove the radio from the dashboard and get the serial number on its side.  With this number it is possible to get the four digit code through a variety of means: some people will charge you for it, for some types of Ford radio you can use the serial number to get the code for free from some websites.

Now, a Ford main dealer can do all this business for you.  However, they also (in the case of my local Ford dealer at least) charge you fifteen quid for the privilege.  Which left me feeling as if I was being held to ransom by Ford, being forced to pay for privilege of being able to fully use the car that I already own.  Unfortunately, finding it impossible to get the radio out of the dashboard myself, I ended up being forced to pay out yet more money on top of the cost of replacing the alternator and battery, in order to get my car back to normal.  So, by the end of today I was fuming.  To put it mildly.  I wouldn't mind so much if the 'security' code required by the radio actually was a security measure.  But it patently isn't.  For one thing, nobody steals car radios anymore.  Particularly generic manufacturer's own brand radios.  But if they did, then all they would have to do to reactivate it would be to read the serial number from the side once they'd removed it from the car and use one of those free web-based decoding services to get the security code...