My petrol station jinx

It turns out I'm not a good person to be around if you want to buy petrol.

It took me 40 minutes to get from home to Eastleigh at around 6am this morning. Normally 20-25 minutes.

The problem? I pulled in for diesel (for my car that is) at the Shell station in Thomas Lewis Way and the till promptly broke down. So, having obtained the diesel, I then stood in a long queue for an age while the friendly but technologically challenged guy behind the counter pressed every button on every machine in the building in the hope that one would magically un-freeze the till (guess what, it didn't) then set off on a mission to find his colleague who shuffles round the forecourt with a yellow jacket on, so that he could put the cones out across the entrance to close the site. He then wrote down all our credit card numbers longhand on a piece of paper to process them later, which means one of two things...

i) It won't happen because he didn't make a note of our names or the card expiry dates or anything like that
ii) My card number is, even now, being used for all kinds of nefarious purposes

While stood in the queue, I watched a van and two cars weave through the cones, which clearly didn't apply to them, to get into the garage and pull up optimistically at the now-switched-off pumps.

This evening, I toddled off to my usual haunt on the corner of Bishopstoke Road and Chickenhall Lane in Eastleigh to greet the Velvet armada as it sailed in from a successful day's hunting, and while I was fuelling the buses, the till broke.

When I went in to fuel bus number two (Jamie, in V12) the situation was only moderately serious - the cashier couldn't dispense card receipts, which didn't bother me too much as our snazzy new fuel cards have an internet information facility that tells us precisely how much fuel we have put in which fictitious vehicle (because, curiously, the cashiers always mistype the registration numbers) so we don't really need the receipts.

By the time it came to bus number three (Maria, in 384 - her adopted second home!) the cashier had realised he couldn't open the till either so had a small mountain of cash gradually building up on his desk. Finding himself unable to reach his boss on the phone, he made the decision to close the site.

Only thing is, Esso don't seem to bother with someone shuffling round the forecourt with a yellow jacket on, so quite how he was going to close it with a queue of ten people and more cars arriving by the second was a bit beyond me. With hindsight, he's a nice enough guy, I should have offered to put the cones out for him, but you don't think of these things at the time.

So bus four, Alison in W558, went straight to the yard and will now have to be fuelled in the morning.

A few weeks ago, we had the rare honour of running the petrol station dry, halfway through fuelling W558, so I'm surprised they haven't barred me yet.

In between times, we kind of blundered our way through the day really, more by luck than judgment. Certainly this morning's ragtag army wasn't a pretty sight...

- One of us (me) about 20 minutes later than planned having cast my spell on the Shell garage, not that that mattered, still got out in plenty of time to meet my public on the 0708
- One of us turned up with a bad stomach
- One of us turned up having not slept all night (didn't quite get why, I must admit)
- One of us didn't turn up at all, having overslept and still being asleep when phoned 12 minutes before supposed departure time on the first trip, so Taz had to get that one started

So that just left one, Steve, who managed to turn up on time, in a good mood, and get the day off to a good start.

Meanwhile, W558 has now sustained a bad crack on the nearside windscreen so that needs replacing, so we a good old discussion about that in the yard and eventually booked it in for a replacement tomorrow afternoon. Bizarrely, the crack is on the inside! V12 and V14 are both off for a deep clean (by a proper cleaning company, don't you know) tomorrow morning so there'll be some juggling there. Still, it means I get to use V12 on the 0708 so that can't be bad really.

V14 finally managed to get its rigorous pre-service maintenance inspection today, and came through with flying colours. The only outstanding issue is with the 'start' button in the cab (which, in simple terms, doesn't) so that and the deep clean are all that stands between V14 and the adoring public!

With all this in mind, KU02 YUH goes off hire on Friday so Dawson Rentals will collect at their leisure. And that's definitely good for the bank balance!

In the middle of all that I managed to press on with some year end financial accounting issues (our financial year ended 31st March), and there'll be plenty more of that to come in the next few days!

Happily, the numbers are looking ok, but to be a bit adventurous we've decided to do a special deal to all young people aged 5-18 of a 50p flat fare for any single journey on route A during the school holidays. Now all we've got to is to promote it!