newmercman:
Wire, I know exactly what you mean, the first thing I used to put in my lorry, for a trip over the water, was my tool box. I’ve fitted new head gaskets on compressors, changed wheel bearings, rewired trailers & much more, all on the side of the road, I’ve repaired a broken wiper linkage on a Turbostar with superglue & a coat hanger & driven back from Alicante with no windscreen, but that was in a different time, in today’s world nobody would let you do that kind of thing, there’s a set list of procedures & you cannot, under any circumstances, think for yourself, use a bit of common sense & deviate from this list, being a lorry driver now means just that, you drive the lorry, you don’t do anything else, it’s all part of the dumbing down process, to old codgers like you & I, it’s taken a lot of the fun out of the job, but that’s the world we now live in 
Having said that, there have been [zb] about since the invention of the wheel, I’ve seen a bloke call out DKV emergency on a weekend in France because he had no trailer lights, it turned out to be a 500 quid repair, it was a blown FUSE 
I recently did a spot of deer hunting & got two of the little [zb]ers, one managed to make it under the bumper & on the way through ripped out all my airlines on the trailer brake chambers, I had all the trailer wheels lock up at 70 odd & went through some very odd angles before I got over to the shoulder, it was after midnight & I was in the middle of nowhere, so out came the tool box, I wound off the spring brakes & 20mins later I was rolling again, ok, I had no trailer brakes, but I was only going to the nearest truckstop to wait for someone to bring out new airlines in the morning, all in a day’s work for us, but a sackable offence in the UK 
Sackable offense ? More like imprisonable! I’d love to see what a VOSA inspector or Copper would say when if he found you’d disabled your brakes.
If you read the posts on here Mr Wire & Co you’ll see drivers running into trouble all the time due to the massive amount of legislation to do with haulage in Europe. Be it tacho, working time, & sometimes “minor” defects all of which lead up to big fines & grief from VOSA etc. Even the trucks themselves are programed to slow down when you run out of Ad-Blue.
Like modern cars, they are manufactured more & more to keep the “oily bits” away from the untrained. Of course it’s as much to do with making £ than any concern about the Environment & safety.
The powers that be dont wont drivers doing anything beyond changing a bulb, because if you do & end up making things worse your arse will be soundly kicked big time, no matter how good your intentions.
So the OP did the right thing. he was unsure, so he defected the trailer until a trained person could say it was ok to use or not. more importantly he stood up to the ■■■■ in the office who tried to bully him into using it.
The Cowboy frontier bollox fix it myself doesn’t work in Europe.
if you had an airleak, you could either drop the range change button, stick a pair of mole grips on the pipes or rev the nuts off the engine 
Why are you quoting yourself and calling yourself a muppet? 