Calling out the AA is, for many drivers, a desperate measure. So says Hugh Oram, who spoke to one of the group's rescue truck drivers
Look carefully at the AA building in Suffolk Street, Dublin and you'll find a plaque, unveiled by An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, to commemorate the founding of the Fianna Fail party in this building, in 1926. Today, the building is better known as the heart of the AA's rescue operations as well as AA Roadwatch.
Through this centre and another in Cork, the AA handles about 100,000 calls a year. When the calls come in, they are logged on computer and matched to the nearest patrol.
Thanks to tracking devices, the centre knows at all times exactly where each of its vehicles is, to within about 10 feet. With about 60 patrols on the road, mostly in the Dublin area and including two motor bike patrols for the congested city centre, it also uses garage agents, especially in the more remote areas of the country.
Last December, the AA added six new rescue trucks - one of them a flatbed - to its fleet of vehicles and one of the drivers of those trucks is Graham Hunter, who's been doing the job for the past 11 years.
"I used to be a mechanic in a garage but I love the freedom you get on the open road in this job. I wouldn't dream of going back to the old job," he says. Hunter also reckons it must run in the family; his father was a traffic cop in London who qualified as an accident investigator, while his two brothers also went into the motor trade.
In the rescue truck that Graham Hunter drives, there's a display unit perched on the dashboard and details of each job, together with the map reference from the centre in Suffolk Street.
Most of the shifts he works start at 7 a.m. and finish at 4.30 p.m. Generally, he works in the greater Dublin area but sometimes can find himself further afield. Indeed, one recent shift ended in Wexford. When he started this job, they were using converted Ford Transits and when they were towing, it was a case of the "tail wagging the dog".
With the new trucks, which weigh just under five tonnes, towing is so smooth that you'd hardly notice. The truck has a full range of equipment and also spare petrol and diesel.
One of the biggest problems he deals with is flat batteries. "Often, people simply forget and leave their lights on all night. Another big problem, which generates about 5,000 calls a year is when people lock their cars with the keys inside. Sometimes, they lock the baby inside as well," adds Hunter.
Another common call-out for Graham and his all-male colleagues (the AA has some women drivers for its patrols in Britain, but none here) is when drivers fill up with the wrong fuel. He says that it's easy enough to put petrol into a diesel-engined car, although not the other way round.
"Human error counts for an awful lot of the problems we get. When you're filling up, you just need a moment's distraction, like the kids in the back, to put in the wrong fuel," he explains.
He finds quite a difference between male and female drivers ringing in for assistance. "Often, a male driver will be embarrassed that his car has broken down and will say something like 'I can't find the jack'. Women are much more straightforward and will tell you that their car has broken down and ask for AA assistance."
He notices a big change in bad driving patterns; up to five or six years ago, nearly all the raw aggression he sees every day on the road came from young male drivers. These days, women drivers have gone a long way to catch up and as he says himself, they are often young mothers who should know better.
Yet despite so much aggressive driving, he rarely has problems with AA members - only on two occasions in the past 11 years did the really rude attitudes of a couple of AA members get to him.
On one occasion, he was running an hour late. A motorist needed his tyre changed and insisted that the AA man fit the spare tyre, which turned out to be bald.
Hunter refused and, as he says: "It was downhill all the way from there and I had to withdraw from the situation." In the other incident, a motorist was looking for a long-distance tow that he wasn't entitled to and likewise, the member concerned got thoroughly bad tempered.
In the coming months all AA trucks will have laptops so that drivers such as Graham Hunter will be able to interrogate cars' onboard systems for themselves. That should vastly increase their ability to fix cars at the scene rather than tow them to the garage. However, for the thousands of cars built before the computer age, Hunter and his colleagues will still be reaching for the monkey wrench for some years to come.