2:13 pm, September 16, 2013
In this line of work, you come across more than your fair share of idiots. It is one of the occupational hazards of being a retail transportation consultant, as my good lady wife has taken to introducing me at dinner parties. Idiots come in all shapes and sizes.
Take the gentleman, for example (for want of a better word) who decided he was so unhappy with the Saab 9-5 he’d purchased from me that he drove it straight through my locked gates as I was leaving one evening and demanded his money back.
That, my friend, is not a good opening gambit, as you no doubt found out when you were landed with a criminal damage charge, as well as a Saab that now has the visual appeal to match its reliability.
Had you come back to me politely to explain your grievances, I would happily have made you a cup of tea, explained how I pride myself on running a fair and decent business and that, while it’s not my fault that used cars sometimes misbehave, in order to keep customers happy I have a repair or refund policy. Or to put it another way, s**t happens, but I try to look after good people.
My latest experience of outright idiocy led me to do something I’ve never done before, nor hope to again. No, not murder, though it did cross my mind…
Last week, a well-spoken bloke in a business suit wandered on to my lot around lunchtime. In his late thirties, the object of his desire was a BMW Z3 roadster. Not my usual stock-in-trade, but at this time of year it’s good to have something pretty and topless to draw the customers in. While I didn’t take too much of a shine to blokey’s over-zealous use of Brylcreem or pungently over-applied eau de cologne, his shiny Italian loafers and Frisbee-sized wristwatch suggested he’d be good to come up with the readies. So when he asked if he could take ‘the baby out for a spin’ I figured that it was worth spending 20 minutes listening to his nauseous sleaziness if half an hour later I had an imprint of his credit card and a gap to fill with something equally slippery and roofless.
Little did I realise that the guy was a menace to society. As he lit up the back tyres leaving the lot, I put this down to the car being an unknown quantity and that he’d soon get the hang of it. Then he did the same at the traffic lights, subsequently darting and weaving from lane to lane, almost mowing down an elderly pedestrian as he charged across a zebra crossing with little more than a Mr Toad-style blast of the horn. He proceeded to tear around a housing estate as if it were the Monaco GP Circuit, before taking the Z3 up to just shy of 100mph on the dual carriageway on the outskirts of Halesowen.
Fearing not just for my own welfare, but that of those around me, I asked him if he’d care to slow down a little, all thoughts of a sale cast aside by an overwhelming survival instinct. That was when things turned nasty. Rather than acknowledge my request by taming down his driving, he gave me a lecture.
‘You’re selling t his as a damned performance car, aren’t you? In that bloody case, how am I supposed to know if it’s any good as a performance car if you won’t let me drive it like one?’ I explained that there was a difference between enjoying a performance car (and, let’s face it, the Z3 was hardly BMW’s dynamic tour de force) and driving like a complete psychopath whose belief in his own abilities far outweighed said abilities.
I don’t think that went down well. The veins on his forehead were popping out as he turned a colour not dissimilar to the BMW’s aubergine paintwork.
‘If you think you’re that bloody good, then why don’t you drive the bloody thing yourself, show me what you can do?’ he said, with all the maturity seen in a playground urinating contest. My sense of relief was palpable.
So much so that as we got out of the car to swap seats, I ran round to the driver’s side, gunned the engine, and left the buffoon standing in a cloud of tyre smoke at the bottom of the M5 slip road. I have no idea how he arrived at my lot,
or how or if he got home that evening. But I never saw him again. Never have I been so pleased to have lost a sale…
