Don't you hate it when you think you're hugely exaggerating the extent to which the world can be deliberately unpleasant to you, and suddenly realise you're not?

Driving back from dropping my car off at the garage at lunchtime: ‘Yuck,’ I thought, ‘is there some rule that says when a garage lends you a courtesy car it has to be horrible?’

Moments later, I realised that there probably is! At least, it certainly seems to me that it's in a garage's interests never to give you a courtesy car which you'd rather have than your own. This realisation entirely failed to cheer me up noticeably.

(I'm also now curious to know what a garage does if you come in needing repairs to an absolutely bottom-of-the-range vehicle.)

And a big BAH to electronics in general.

Just picked the car back up. Wests have apparently fixed the rattling sunroof (yay!). They haven't fixed the rattling steering wheel, but will do so next week once they have the necessary part.

And they fixed the Dension, which had stopped playing MP3s about a week after I got the new car. I had hoped that the problem was in the car rather than the Dension, and it seemed likely enough given the timing of the failure; and, indeed, the garage said they just pummelled all the connections and made sure everything was properly seated and it all started working again just like that. Fantastic. I was really not looking forward to sending the stereo off for repair under its own warranty.

So I drove back to the office, with some celebratory music playing on the Dension; and about three minutes from arrival, the wretched thing suddenly cut out and went back to radio-only mode, exactly as it had done the last time. I can only assume that whatever loose connection the garage had nudged back into place has slipped back out of place again.

I get very annoyed when electronics behaves like this. :-(