Obviously I don’t provide enough excitement in my wife’s life, because it seems there’s little she likes more than running the cars on empty. She laughs in the face of ‘running out of fuel on a deserted country road’ and kicks sand in the eye of ‘being able to deal with an emergency without having to stop and get fuel first’.
Picture: Alicia Nijdam
But anyway, in telling you this, I’m really trying to divert your attention away from my own stupidity.
Yesterday while filling the seven seat people-carrier with fuel (because of my wife’s mad obsession above) I noticed a nail stuck in the front tyre. It was a bit annoying because I’m a nice guy and didn’t deserve that kind of shitty luck. The tyre was practically new and after the expense of Christmas it was the last thing I needed.
I gingerly drove to the nearest tyre place and enquired as to whether they could repair the puncture.
The tyre guy sucked his teeth and shook his head. The nail was too close to the tyre wall for a repair. Yes! Of course it was! Because puncture repairs are far less lucrative than tyre replacements.
It got better. They didn’t have the tyre I needed in amongst the ten thousand they had on their racks and had to order it in which would take 24hrs.
I felt like it was my birthday when they offered to fit the gimpy looking space saver.
Great. I’d have to drive the two ton Chrysler Planet Killer round on what was little more than a bicycle wheel for a whole day, feeling sure that other drivers would laugh at me for the pathetic puncture getting fool that I am.
I went through to the workshop area and handed the locking wheel nut key thingy to the fitter goon who set to work making a hash of getting the spare wheel out from under the car – which led me to believe he wasn’t an actual employee but instead some loon who had just walked in off the street, greased up his face and hands, given himself a bad haircut using an axe and removed his top set with a pair of rusty pliers.
He struggled a little while longer before calling over another cyclops looking dude and between them they managed to retrieve the space saver and fit it without further incident.
Toothless handed the locking wheel nut thingy back to me, I stuffed it in my jacket pocket and drove away sulking about how much this was going to cost me.
So this morning – 24 hours later – I returned and spoke the guy on the desk. He told me to take a seat and assured me I wouldn’t have to wait long.
It was bloody freezing in that stinky grotty rabbit hutch of an office/reception/waiting room. The tyre guy had a portable gas heater but he only had one of the three burners going, and he was OK because he was wearing his arctic survival suit.
So, 30 minutes later with icicles on my testicles I was called through and asked to present my locking wheel nut thingy.
Oooops.
I hadn’t taken it out of my jacket pocket from the day before. And THAT jacket was still at home.
Toothless grinned his best toothless grin at me as he realised that he was the better human being.
As I reversed the car out of the place to fetch the tool, I realised that
The moral of the story: Some days you’re the pigeon. Some days you’re the statue.
And for the last two days, I have been the statue.
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