I had a somewhat stressful weekend.

My daughter has just passed her driving test and as a condition of the insurance she needs to have a telematics black box fitted.

The insurance company sent a helpful video where a young lady in a modern MINI fitted the box in under 30 seconds.

So, I decided against getting help to fit it, since the said help was £35 and it looked very easy.

Frances also has an enthusiasm for putting things together that I don’t share, so I thought together we should have no problem.

I mean, all you have to do is connect it to the + and – parts on the battery.

However, once we opened the plastic cover of our Vauxhall Adam battery, we were stumped. There was a very clear positive node to attach the connector to.

But there was no negative node.

Anywhere on the battery.

We watched the video again and tried to match up the top of the MINI’s battery to ours.

We screwed and unscrewed every nut and bolt on the battery.

We tried the connectors on all of them one way, and then the other.

Nothing. No lights on the black box at all.

The notes said if you are having problems “call a friendly local mechanic”.

I called someone better than that, my Dad.

He spent all my youth in the garage taking our cars apart and then putting them back together. He must be able to help us.

So, thanks to the magic of FaceTime and a patient teenager we managed to show him the battery.

He was stumped too.

But then he suggested looking in the manual for the jump start instructions.

Turns out, there is NO negative node on the Adam’s battery.

The negative node is on the engine, 40 cm to the left of the battery. We connected it up and hey presto, the black box worked, but we’d still wasted 30 minutes on a problem that could have been dealt with in the insurance’s instruction booklet.

All they had to say in their instruction leaflet was to read the car manual on jump starting before calling a mechanic. If we had done that we would have been done in under 5 minutes.

How many of your instructions to your clients about your products are clear and up to date?

Do they assume a level of understanding that is not there, particularly in new clients?

Next time I will know what to do, and in a couple of years I will have to do it again for Christopher.

But how many of your clients don’t buy again from you because it was too difficult to use or understand your product?

P.S. The black box is working well and Frances is tracking every trip she makes for her points, because points mean cheaper insurance next year!