
The first ten minutes
The first thing our controller asks is where you are standing, not what is wrong with the car. Between Buccleuch and Allandale there is no shoulder worth the name, so before anything else you are told to get everyone out on the far side of the barrier and to walk the triangle forty-five metres back, not the ten paces most people manage. The truck is dispatched while you are still on the line, and she stays on the line with you until the beacon is in your mirror. Before the vehicle is winched on, the driver walks it with you and photographs all four corners, the odometer and anything already broken. Those photographs go onto the job card with the time and the GPS point, and they are what stops the argument three weeks later about whether the bumper was cracked before or after. If your insurer is on our panel we open the job under their reference at the roadside, you pay the excess and nothing else, and the car goes to their approved panel-beater rather than to whichever yard is nearest.









