Fresh after myself and Papa Phallus MOT'd our bikes Zippy popped his across to Trackside Motorcycles for his turn to persuade the tester, "It's supposed to be like that, honest mate".
His lovely blue VFR was polished and tweaked and pampered then despatched off to the test station.
Our friendly tester guy wheeled the bike in, wandered around making a few notes and nodding in appreciation. He strolled across to his computer monitor and set about typing in the bikes details, this done he prodded the enter button and all manner of alarms and red flashy lights burst into life.
"Oh dear!" said tester fella "That doesn't look good".
All UK testing stations are computer linked to a master computer at the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) in Swansea, this computer checks the bike's details and complete history before giving the go ahead to the testing station to test the bike.
"I think it's a ringer, mate" said Mr tester "can't test it"
As shocked as we all were we took encouragement from the fact that the DVLA are all a bunch of numpties and are continually making embarrassing mistakes, especially as Zippy has had the bike for a couple years and no such problems have arisen before. There are checks you can make yourself including a number of online vehicle check companies and even a couple of mobile phone based ones. So it was one of these latter companies that I decided to use to see if I could get to the bottom of this mystery.
I typed in Zippy's bike's Registration number and sent the text, wait a couple of seconds, then - beep beep, beep beep. Text has arrived, Right, time to sort this mess out.....
*Thank you for using our service, your vehicle is as follows- White, 1987, Bedford Rascal van. No outstanding finance, one previous owner, No accident damage.......end*
"What!!!!!!! that can't be right...............Or can it?
Lets look at the facts.
Rascal vs VFR - similar acceleration, similar top speed, similar desirability, both piloted by famous kids TV characters (if anyone remembers Sooty and Sweep driving a rascal back in the 80's, give yourself a pat on the back, and of course our own Zippy).
So as you can see I think this mix is up is a fairly common occurrence for poor VFR owners. Check out the pictures and see if you can tell them apart.
Difficult isn't it.
But seriously, Zippy got in touch with DVLA and they admitted to making a screw-up on his registration document, it has now been amended and the testing station now have Zippy's bike back ready to test.
All's well that ends well.....I hope
Bungle
2 comments:
Hehe
Woah! That's great (but not great at the time of course).
Methinks it's time for a letter to DVLA poking gentle fun at the Welsh :-)
Thanks for sharing!
Post a Comment