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I’ve had real trouble sleeping this week and it’s nothing to do with the baby and today I would loved to have stayed in bed all morning, but I’d arranged to test drive a potential new car for touring/countryside living and had to be at VW West London at 10am. I had nearly rung them up and asked if we could do it later, but I am a stickler for punctuality and I couldn’t let them down. VW have had a tough couple of years, but I have remained loyal to them, whatever horrible emissions they have tried to cover up and with them announcing they were letting hundreds of staff go in Germany today, it’s nice to help out a struggling business. I had booked the test drive on line, but had confirmed it by phone. I could get it done and then get on with my busy day. This was pretty much the only free hour I have in my schedule until December.
I was going to look at a second hand car and had checked a website beforehand so I could pretend to be a man and knew the things I should be looking out for and what I should and shouldn’t say. I wasn’t going to tell them whether I wanted to have finance for the car or if I was paying it all up front and I had to look at tyre tread and also look for white residue around some part of the engine - oh I’d pretty much forgotten what I was doing. But I wasn’t planning on making a decision today. I was just going to drive the car I had chosen around to see if I was OK with it - and maybe ask to sit in the back whilst the salesman drove me around to find out how comfortable it would be for touring and how practical for writing in (not that I generally get much writing done on the road).
When I got there I was told the guy I’d booked my test drive in was busy with another customer. OK, fair enough, these things happen. But a bit weird. They said if he was going to be ages then someone else would see to me. And ten minutes later another salesman came over and said he’d be doing the test drive, otherwise I might be waiting around for hours. Made no difference to me.
He didn’t seem to have any details on the car that I was going to be driving though and asked me if I knew the registration. I had to check through my emails to find it. I mean I had assumed the point of booking a time for the test drive was so that they could have the car ready to go, but maybe there had been some glitch somewhere. I was remaining patient. Even though I’d had two hours sleep and the appointment time was about 15 minutes ago. The salesman was also quite insistent that we went through lots of details beforehand. What was I looking to pay for the car and how was I going to pay. I said that that would depend on a few factors - remember I hadn’t seen the car yet. But he was quite insistent that we got the price and payment sorted out so that it would save time later on. Again this seemed odd, but I can see that what they let the car go for depends on how you are going to pay for it. That was the reason I’d been told not to make any early commitments. And when he pressed me I obviously quoted a low price, which he said was impossible. Which is why you don’t negotiate before a customer has seen the thing he is trying to buy.
Anyway, having failed to ascertain very much but wasted a bit more time, and having given him the registration number for the car he was supposed to be trying to sell me, he went upstairs to get it, telling me he’d be pulling up outside the showroom in two or three minutes. I waited outside in the cold for about ten minutes. He finally turned up with a car and immediately asked me, “Is this the right one?” Even though I had given him the reg of the car ten minutes earlier and given it twice to the show room in the previous couple of days, he had driven down in a different car. Again I remained patient and once again gave him the correct registration. I was tempted, given how much time had already gone by to just test drive the car that I hadn’t booked in for. I mainly wanted to get a feel for the model, although wasn’t averse to purchasing something straight away if I really liked it (but I am not telling you how I was planning to pay for it. That was my ace up the sleeve).
In spite of being grouchy from tiredness I took this set back well and the wrong salesman took the wrong car back up to the showroom upstairs and went to look for the right car.
I now looked at my watch and realised how much time I had wasted and wondered why this supposedly professional show room hadn’t had the car sitting outside waiting for me at 10am as we’d arranged. I figured that something had gone wrong and the guy I had booked in with (twice) had forgotten about this booking. That explained why he was in the middle of an hour long negotiation with another customer and why no one seemed to know which car I wanted to drive.
But even if that was the case, the professional showroom (who should be doing all they could do to recover from the bad press that they have received over the last two years) had now had half an hour to work out which car I’d booked, with the additional help of me having told them.
I could have stayed in bed after all and I could have been getting on with the writing I am meant to be doing, but instead I was sitting in the reception waiting to see if they were able to locate one of the cars they were trying to sell. Had the original salesman taken someone else out in it? Probably not, but to be honest if they just told me why they had fucked up I would probably not have minded too much. But slowly as the minutes ticked by I got more impatient and realised that my natural inclination to say “No problem” and wait was the wrong one. The salesman had been keen to save me time later by getting the financial deal all sorted out in advance, but not so keen to save me time by actually producing the car that I was interested in. Perhaps there was no car. Maybe they were just hoping I would buy it, sort out all the paperwork and then the minute they had my money, scarper and leave the showroom forever. It would be a lot of effort for a couple of thousand pound profit and this long term sting involving setting up a showroom and leaving it and all the cars in it behind might not be worth the pay off. But who knows what was going on here?
By 10.40 I was annoyed, but had invested so much time by now that I was reluctant to leave or complain. I decided I would give him until 10.45 to find the car that should have been waiting for me at 10am. And 10.45 came and went, so so did I. The salesman was nowhere to be seen, so I told the man who worked out in the cold car park that I was going and to tell him I’d be in touch with the manager to discuss what had happened. My only regret was no longer having a Metro column to bring this Customer Relationship disaster to a wider audience. It felt more like one of those psychological experiments where they try to determine someone’s breaking point of patience, rather than a struggling business trying to restore public confidence. But hey, things go wrong and people screw up - I am not that interested in getting any one into trouble for that as I screw up all the time - what was more interesting was I lasted 40 minutes before I started to feel like I wasn’t being taken very seriously and started to get affronted.
I had very little emotional energy to spare and this waste of time punched a massive hole in my day. Perhaps had I stayed in bed I would have been good for something later. But instead I felt narked and in no mood to get on with my proper work. I did complain to the manager and he rang me later, though I missed his call, but I don’t feel very inclined to be forgiving or give them a second chance to be weirdly passive aggressive towards me before letting me test drive a magic car that only very clever people can see. So much for all my internet prep of being a real man who knows about white dust around the flange nodules.
