I’ve never been great with hands-on workmanship and appreciate that there are times when you just have to fork out to somebody to perform a simple task. You pay a reasonable rate for the knowledge, and the guy rocks up and does the job.

One example of this is fitting parts to cars. Vehicle manufacturers overly complicate their designs in order to push punters back into the approved dealer networks, so fitting services on the high street have become a viable service. Car headlamps are a classic because the tight spaces will see you slash your wrists (literally) unless you are blessed with dwarf hands.

Those are great for changing bulbs and of course for making your weapon look bigger in your unsolicited cock pics.

Onto a good thing, some retailers have widened their fitting services, cranked up the prices, and gone full tilt on the squeeze and rinse.

Step forward, Halfords.

Only this week, a business contact mentioned to me how these shameless shitebags charge their customers £16 to fit a £1 single-filament bulb. Of course, they sell the same bulbs for £3.49 for two. A bird in the hand and all that…

And there’s more.

A car battery retailing elsewhere at £55 goes for £102 in Halfords, plus an £18 fitting fee, which for that cockwomble cabal is fitting.

£18 for a lift and drop. Jesus. Presumably, for that wedge they also take you into the back of the storeroom, bend you over, and pass you round like a damp joint.

Even a more complicated battery job might mean removing a headrest and popping a seat forward. Heaven forfend, they might have to undo a couple of nuts and remove a clasp. It’s not a demanding gig even for a bloke with two left hands like moi.

It’s not all one-way traffic though.

Perhaps we might give them a nudge and tell them to hire a retail consultant to subject their grasping strategy to a little scrutinty.

Their in-store WeFit service for batteries arguably needs to be reimagined because most customers with flat batteries can’t start the cars in order to get to Orange Hell and be furiously bumraped.

It’s the one saving grace of this whole overblown farce.

They’d be better off flogging the batteries and providing some free advice on how to put them in, but that really would start to encroach into the customer care space, which would probably never do.

In today’s UK, they really do fit.