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Whew. Well, that was a massive faff and a half.
This morning I drove to Newmarket in my battered old Peugeot 106. This afternoon, I've just driven home again in my new Clio.
This has taken the entire morning. I had prepared a lengthy checklist of everything to remember on the day of the handover, but of course several things managed to cause trouble nonetheless. First we had insurance doom: Direct Line's computers had crashed, so they were unable to update my policy – meaning that I was dependent on them getting their computers back up before it would be legal for me to drive the new car away! However, this turned out to be a boon, since I still needed to be able to drive the old car in order to nip home and pick up its current MOT certificate, which I had cleverly left in my ‘to be sorted’ pile of paperwork and despite checking twice had not noticed that the topmost MOT in the pile I was taking with me was last year's. Meanwhile the people in the garage were trying to install the Dension into the new car, and had discovered they were missing a piece of radio aerial which it took them an hour to go and get from somewhere else.
Once I got back with the proper MOT certificate, I phoned Direct Line again and this time managed to get them to take my details and say they'd call me back on my mobile. Brilliantly, they did this just as I was on the garage's phone talking to my bank (who were doing routine checks on a Switch transaction that large, and who can blame them?), so I genuinely had to do the thing where you talk into two telephones at once.
Still, all sorted out in the end; we did all the paperwork, I piled all the stuff I'd taken out of the old car into the new one, got in, started the engine, rebooted the somewhat miffed Dension a couple of times until it started playing music again, put it into gear and moved off. At which point the Dension suddenly stopped playing music and started flashing ‘TEL CALL’. Apparently it thought my (non-existent) car phone had just rung, and had helpfully stopped the music so I could hear the fictitious person at the other end of the putative line.
Read the Dension manual; no help. Went back in to query this; the guy I'd been dealing with was now talking to another customer and it looked like a long job, and the other guy said he didn't know much about stereos and I really needed to talk to my guy. Sigh. Sit back down with book (at least I'd remembered to bring that), wait my turn. My guy, it turned out, figured the problem out fairly fast, cut one wire in the manner of a bomb-defusion expert, and then I was really on my way home with my music playing merrily.
So, phew. Now for some lunch.
Apparently, he says, although the plugs are standard shapes, the semantics of the various pins are insufficiently well defined, and the Clio was sending a signal down one of them when the car moved, but the Dension was expecting to interpret a signal on that pin as an incoming phone call.
So my guy simply cut the relevant wire (a tricky procedure in itself, since there were two identical pink wires going to that pin on the car side of the connector, and he knew which one to cut). But it certainly looked a lot more to me as he performed a hacky workaround for a standards problem than as if he screwed up something well-defined.
Car wiring has always been entertaining. I don't know if they still do it, but in all the older Vauxhalls the positive leads were black and the grounds were brown. I thought that was a bit confusing... I set fire to a dashboard learning that one :)