138) Completing the Trailer

Another thing Jonny had to do was finish building his trailer. He had started it some years before and would work on it when he did not have anything else in progress. It had been on the go for quite a while but as one could not sell a half built trailer he had to do something about it. He bought the components that he needed and completed the work but the process of registering a homemade trailer was horrendous. I think that there had been a great deal of corruption in the vehicle registration departments so to try and combat that the authorities were making it harder and harder to register vehicles. We went first to the vehicle registration office in Pinetown and were sent from there to the other office miles away where we had to fill in the forms. Once the forms were filled in we had to go back to the Pinetown office to get the trailer checked. By the time we got there, it was closing time and the gentleman on the door had locked up and was not going to let us in. The charming young African girl behind the counter who recognised us from our visit earlier in the day came and dealt with us at the door. I think she gave us another set of forms that had to be taken to one of the government approved mechanics for his signature. She knew that if she gave us the forms we could get the next stage of the process going and might be able to complete it before the end of the week. If we had had to wait until opening time the next day to get those forms we would have ended up having to wait another whole week to get the trailer on the road. The next morning after the mechanic had inspected the trailer and certified it to be roadworthy we had to once again go to the Pinetown office so that we could get it weighed on the weighbridge. We did not have much ready cash on us as we intended paying for it with a cheque but this section of the licensing department refused to accept a cheque so we started emptying out our pockets to see how much we could come up with. We emptied my purse and looked for any loose change at the bottom of my handbag, Jonny went through all his pockets and we scratched in the consul of the car to see what we could find there. We did find some extra cash but after all that we were still 19c short. The man in that department was not friendly and helpful like his female colleague who had been so kind the day before, he would not budge about the cheque and would not let us get away with the 19c. As Jonny and I walk down the steps and into the car park we were complaining and moaning about the waste of time of having to go to the bank and change a cheque and come back to get the trailer weighed. A passing man must have heard some of our conversation and stopped to speak to us. We told him the sad tale about being 19c short of cash and how it meant that we would not get the trailer registered that day and we would have to finish it all off the next week as this was Friday. The kind man took pity on us and gave us a 25c piece, we asked for his address so that we could repay him but he would not hear of it .So once again back to the cashier to pay him the money. It was a great pleasure to be able to give him the money in small change that he had to count out. Not a great deal of revenge but it was good to get our own back on him in a very small way.
Once the trailer had been weighed we then had to go back to the other office for the number to be stamped on the chassis to make it all legal. I am giving a very abbreviated account of the whole thing; I think all in all the process took us almost four days. We thought that we were never going to get it sorted out and felt like dumping the thing in the sea. We were very fortunate that our good friends Doug and Anne Marshall who had gone to visit their son in New Zealand had left their truck with us over this period, as we did not have a tow hitch on our car. Without Doug’s truck we could not have got any of the paper work on the trailer done and maybe would have ended up throwing it into the sea.