The lights are on but no one's home

After I left school I spent two years training to be a mechanic. After deciding that I didn’t particularly enjoy coming home every day covered head to toe in oil and with broken knuckles from accidentally punching part of the engine for the umpteenth time, I decided I needed a change of career.

Another motivational factor in my decision was that I figured my aspirations of becoming a professional racing driver might stand a better chance if I had a job that actually paid me in real money rather than in dog biscuits. That way I might be able to finance my drive rather than wait for the fairy godmother to appear and bless me with a huge windfall.

Still, my years spent as a grease monkey didn’t go to waste. I can still do a basic service on my car and I have correctly diagnosed several faults on my own vehicles over the years. I have enough mechanical knowledge to vaguely tell the bloke at the garage what is wrong with it, whereby he will completely ignore me and phone me up later in the day telling me exactly what I told him earlier. Only less eloquently.

So recently when my fiancée’s headlight went on her car, I told her I would fit it. Not a problem at all. I went down to the local Toyota dealership and bought a halogen bulb. Now, I would like to point out that my fiancée has a Toyota Aygo. Because these cars look like they have escaped from a cartoon, they are very compact – especially in the bonnet area. This was my first problem because I am quite a tall chap with rather large hands.

Being a Japanese company, Toyotas are obviously designed to be fiddled with by Japanese people with very small Japanese hands. I basically had to dislocate my wrist to get to the back of the light fitting. After struggling to remove the rubber seal that protects the electrics because it had been glued to the metal with dirt, I then had to spend an eternity trying to get to the clip that holds the bulb in place because I could only move two fingers in the cramped space. I then got my hand stuck.

Anyway, after much swearing, I finally managed to untangle my hand from the origami knot it had worked itself into and went inside to scrub the horrible black dirt off my hands. I told my fiancée that a job like that would have taken about thirty seconds on a Ford and that Toyotas are rubbish.

These days I own a Ford Focus; partly because they are cheap and partly because I am boring and have no imagination. Ironically, my headlight went about a week later so I went into my local Ford Dealership and purchased a bulb. Sure enough when I opened the bonnet there was plenty of space to fit my hand in. I unclipped the casing from the rear of the light and unhooked the wiring. Unfortunately some genius has decided to put the fitting of the light itself out of visible reach so I had to fiddle around trying to find the fastening clip, completely lacerating my hands on sharp bits of metal and plastic that have no logical purpose. I came to the conclusion that they have been put there with the sole intention of tearing skin.

Eventually I unfastened the clip and proceeded to break my knuckles on some unseen interior part when I lifted my hand up. To cut a long story short, I put the new bulb in and replaced all the coverings. I didn’t take 30 seconds, it took about 5 minutes.

As fate would have it, my dad’s headlight went a few days later. Now, my dad also has no imagination and owns a Ford Focus. Having experienced the delights of changing my own earlier in the week I offered to do his. It was bound to be exactly the same.

Well it wasn’t. Despite having the same sort of car, my dad owns an estate version. For some reason the designers decided this was a good enough excuse to make the layout of the bonnet completely different. I opened the bonnet and was confronted with a sea of plastic covers. After unclipping everything that looked like it was attached to the headlight, I gave up and did something completely unmanly: I got out the manual.

I eventually found how to remove the headlights under the section titled “Emergency Roadside Maintenance”. The instructions told me I needed to unscrew the fitting on a big case at the rear of the big unit, remove the top, un-hook some big plastic clips underneath and remove the entire lighting unit. It also transpired that I needed Torx screwdrivers to unscrew the casing.

Everybody owns at least one flat-headed screwdriver and one Phillips screwdriver. Very few people own Torx screwdrivers. Most people won't even know what one is. I only own a set of them because, as I mentioned earlier, I spent two years as a mechanic and acquired some specialist tools.

We ended up having to drive my dad’s car round to my house to change his headlight bulb. It left me wondering how the hell this job can be classified under “Emergency Roadside Maintenance”. Put yourself in this situation: You are driving down the M1 at night and your headlight goes. Not wanting to get stopped by some bored traffic jobbies who haven’t reached their monthly targets set by the government, you pull over and attempt to replace it. On the off-chance you have a spare bulb in the glove compartment and assuming that you already know you have to lift the Ford badge up on the bonnet and utter the secret password to open it, you are expected to have specialist tools at your disposal. You are then expected to fish for clips that are not only out of reach but are impossible to see even in the daylight. You are then expected to be double jointed and then have your hands torn to pieces by metal clips. Personally I would class that under “Stuff that should be left to your local Ford Dealership so they can charge you a gazillion pounds to do what should be a relatively straightforward task”.

It seems to me that car manufacturers are deliberately making simple jobs harder to force people to go to a franchised dealer. You might say I'm cynical and that would be fine because I am. Of course it could just be that I was never a very good mechanic and that would also be true. That was the other reason I changed career.