Today's Adventure

note: this was suppossed to be posted yesterday, but various little things got in the way…

Some mornings just aren’t worth getting up for. That’s what I learned today.

You see it all started when I stopped at the ATM to get some cash so that I could buy an espresso on the way in to the office. When I was walking back to my truck I noticed that my left rear tire was almost entirely flat. It still had a little air in it so I decided I could probably make it to the gas station up the street to put more air in it (realizing that this would likely not be the ultimate fix — there had to be a reason it was so low suddenly).

When I got to the Diamond Shamrock, I quickly filled it with air and then immediately started checking it for leaks. Luckily, the ground was all wet and I had some shop towels in the cab, so I started wiping water all over it to look for bubbles. Of course a moment later it was clear that even this was unnecessary. There was a rather large and obivous nail jutting out towards the inside edge of the tire.

Or course, everyone knows you shouldn’t drive on a tire with a nail in it, right? Well, I figured that I had made it this far, I could make it to somewhere to get my tire fixed. After a little thought, it occured to me that there was a Firestone on the other side of the freeway that was probably open.

To be honest, if I could choose anyplace else, I would have, but from past experience I can tell you that there aren’t many places that open at 7 in the morning. In addition, I had originally bought this tire from Firestone and was pretty sure that I had road hazard insurance on it.

Well, guess what? Unless you have the paperwork on you, road hazard insurance doesn’t do you a lot of good. We’ll just ignore the fact that all the Firestone’s are connected by a computer network. We’ll ignore that fact that I know they can see the inventory at other stores from past experiences. What the f***?!?!

So, I’m like, “ok, just patch it and I’ll pay for it.” Then I sit down and drink a cup of some bad coffee (actually, I’ve had worse, it was reasonable at least). About 15 minutes later I hear a bit of a commotion from the counter. I hear something about “can’t patch it,” but it takes another 5 minutes before someone comes over to tell me what’s up.

Turns out, this tire had been patched before (can’t keep up with how many nails I’ve gotten in my tires — I should have been collecting them as souvenirs — could have sold them on Ebay when I’m famous). But it gets better. You see, not only had it been patched before, but the patch just happened to be right next to where the current nail was embedded. So they couldn’t patch it.

So I got stuck buying a new tire. I don’t think the old tire had more than 10000 miles on it. I should have asked for it back (might have found someone else who could make the patch), but I didn’t think of that at the time. What a morning.