The Wrong Lesson

 There should be some sort of public information campaign about buying raffle tickets for fucked cars. Not ordinary raffle tickets. I have no objection to tombolas. Win a bottle of advocaat or a hamper containing stale crackers and three preserves nobody particularly wants and everyone goes home happy. I mean the online raffles where, for approximately the price of a coffee, you can suddenly become the owner of a vehicle you would never under any normal circumstances have considered buying.

A few weeks ago, Dan spent £4.50 on a ticket to win a Mercedes. He won it. This was received as excellent news. I was less convinced.

The company running the raffle has, to be fair, an excellent business model. Buy a car for perhaps £2,000, sell enough £4.50 tickets to bring in something approaching £18,000, hand the car to the winner and repeat. I cannot fault this. The difficulty lies entirely with the sort of person who sees a £4.50 chance of acquiring a Mercedes and thinks this is an opportunity which must not be allowed to pass.

The Mercedes arrived looking like the sort of car that had stories. Dan, however, had won a Mercedes for £4.50, and this fact exerted considerable influence over his judgement. It is very difficult to criticise a £4.50 Mercedes because the response is always essentially the same: it was £4.50. This is true. It is also not the same as the car being good.

The Mercedes needed an MOT. Dan insured it and I followed him to the garage in my car, largely because I had a feeling this might not go entirely to plan.

On the way, the fuel pump failed. The brakes were also considering their position. This seemed to me quite an ambitious amount of mechanical collapse for one short journey, but the Mercedes had apparently decided that if it was going to reveal itself, it might as well do so properly. Somehow, it limped the rest of the way to the garage.

They did not say there were a few things that ought to be addressed, nor did they say it would need a bit of work. They effectively said, “Mate, don’t even bother.” The Mercedes was, in professional terms, an absolute nail.

I left Dan at the garage calling the RAC and came home. Not long afterwards he messaged to say the wait was eight hours and could I come back and get him. I suggested that at this point the kindest thing might be to scrap the Mercedes, and drove back to collect him.

On the way home, he gave me the full account. Naturally, this began with the garage’s verdict, which I had heard for myself, followed by the eight-hour RAC wait, which was why I had gone back to collect him. Dan is committed to chronology.

He had called a scrap company. They would not take the Mercedes without the V5. This was unfortunate because, in all the weeks he had owned the car, the V5 had never actually arrived. So he rang the raffle company to chase it and mentioned, almost incidentally, that the Mercedes was now sitting at a garage and would cost more to put right than he was prepared to spend.

They offered him £1,500 to buy it back.

I had gone out to retrieve Dan from beside a condemned car and returned home with someone who had made money on the deal.

Unfortunately, Dan has now spent £4.50 on a raffle ticket, won a Mercedes, discovered that the Mercedes is catastrophically fucked, driven it on what may have been its final journey, experienced simultaneous fuel and braking enthusiasm, had it condemned by a garage, failed to scrap it because nobody had sent him the paperwork, and sold it back to the people who gave it to him for £1,500.

He has made £1,495.50.

This is not how cautionary tales are supposed to end. This is where the lesson is supposed to arrive. He is supposed to stand beside the ruined Mercedes, £600 poorer, while I look at him with the restrained expression of a woman who has explicitly said this would happen. Instead, he has been financially rewarded.

This is a serious problem.

Before this happened, I had arguments available to me. I could point out that a £4.50 raffle ticket was not a sensible method of acquiring a motor vehicle. I could mention probability, mechanical history, due diligence or simply the general inadvisability of owning a Mercedes nobody had been prepared to buy in the conventional manner.

I can no longer do any of that.

Dan now has evidence.

For the rest of our lives, every time a raffle appears containing some decrepit Jaguar, questionable Range Rover or Porsche photographed carefully enough not to show the bit that has fallen off, he will be able to point to the Mercedes. He will not remember the failed fuel pump, the brakes, the garage, the eight-hour RAC wait or the brief period in which we were trying to persuade somebody to take it away for scrap. He will remember that he spent £4.50 and received £1,500.

I have not watched someone learn a lesson. I have watched Dan acquire a precedent.

There will be another raffle, another suspicious vehicle photographed from its most flattering angle and another ticket costing less than a sandwich. Dan will look at it with the serene confidence of someone whose last £4.50 shitbox produced a return of more than 33,000 per cent.

He is going to be absolutely fucking insufferable.