My commute today was interrupted. I was coming into work after a long session of logic thinking the night before that brought me to the conclusion that instead of keeping office hours and sitting around the last few hours of the day with nothing to do; I would leave after the warehouse left. When the receiving department leaves there is no longer anything to receive into the system. My work load ends when they leave. So I should probably come in when they come in so that I can leave when they leave. It made sense to me. The interruption came from my passenger side rear tire that had come to the logical conclusion that it was tired of carrying my ass to work every day and was no longer going to retain thirty five pounds of air pressure. Zero was about the amount of pounds it was looking to hold and with some serious vibrations that took my mind away from a new CD I burned this morning and was grooving out to, it succeeded to hold no air.
I wasn’t aware of exactly what had happened until I was on the side of the road looking at the problem. Walking from my side of the car to the side the vibrations came from I could smell burnt rubber. I assumed something horrible had happened. It hadn’t really occurred to me that my tire might be flat. The car didn’t react as violently as I had thought it might at 70mph with only three tires doing their jobs. It was almost a relief when I saw it. Not thinking of the financial implications of it I opened my trunk and retrieved the spare, the jack and the tire iron. I even had a blanket back there that I laid down on the ground so I didn’t get wet.
I normally wear my dressier pants to work four days out of the week reserving jeans for the generous “casual Friday.” With almost as much thought and consideration as I had put into changing my hours I also had decided that if everyone in the office was wearing jeans, shorts or even sweat pants; I should be allowed to do it too. No one had ever spoken to me about dress code the whole time I’ve worked here, not even when I took a position in the office. I had roughly assumed that there was a Casual Friday and the other four days of the week we were to wear business casual. I don’t know if there was a sudden implementation of Casual Tuesdays or the warmer weather or lighter workloads of a slow season had somehow entitled us to a relaxed dressing environment but at any rate I wasn’t copied on that memo.
Even if I didn’t have the blanket to lay out I was wearing jeans that made it much more comfortable to change a tire. The rain was an extra added bonus that only really started to factor in when the nuts were loose enough to hand un-tighten but the hub cap wasn’t very accommodating for my big fingers. It was a long process of finger tip loosening the lug nuts. When they were all off and the hub cap was in the grass I found out that the wheel was kind of fused to the lugs. I can only imagine how I looked on the side of the road kicking the rim, trying to break it free. I’m sure it appeared as though a disgruntled motorist was showing his displeasure with the defunct vehicle by kicking the living shit out of it. A much funnier scene than what was actually happening. I took the tire iron which was made for my car (or at least shipped with it) that had a perfectly sized socket at one end and a chisel point at the other. I crammed it into the holes in the rim and leveraged it against the brake drum. It eventually came off.
There really isn’t anything as pathetic as the donut tire. Even on a tiny car like mine it doesn’t seem like something significant enough to drive on. The weight of my car and the value of my life don’t seem like the type of things I could feel comfortable gambling against the unfortunate size and limited abilities of a donut tire. In situations like this however there are no other choices.
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