Fencing is dangerous!
One of the many renovation tasks on my seemingly infinite list of jobs in our new (to us) home was to remove the rather tatty and potentially lethal asbestos fence and replace it with a nice shiny modern fence. The old fence sheets are buried nearly a metre into the ground and after taking nearly half an hour to dig out one of the 40+ sheets I decided to go to the big boy's toy store and hire a mini-excavator. If you ever get the chance to use one, do it, they're great fun!

40 sheets, several huge tree roots and a small pile of old dairy machinery later, the fence was down, but not before I'd reversed over our cheap, temporary mail box in my first few minutes of random lever waggling. No problem, once I'd finished I nipped down to the local DIY warehouse and bought a replacement for about four quid. Half an hour later (including walking to and from the shop) the mail box was replaced.

Later that day Mrs SteamedCleaner needs to go out, so hops in the car and reverses down the driveway. Being the considerate person she is, she put in an extra special effort to avoid the shiny new mailbox and kept it in view in her side mirror. It only dawned on her that the strange screeching noise and slight resistance to her reversing was coming not from the mail box, but from my car, which was parked on the other side.

So the cheap mail box remains undamaged, but my car needed a new body panel and a respray.

I am not allowed to bring this incident up in any arguments as it is deemed unfair and unrepresentative (as is the time 2 months earlier when she reversed into a supporting column at the local petrol station).
( SteamedCleaner, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 16:41, Reply)