By: Hank Harwell
A friend of mine says quite often “some days it don’t pay to get out of bed.” It was certainly true today.
The day started out innocently enough, but there were omens: I got the bathroom first, I was able to eat my breakfast undisturbed, and I didn’t have a (major) argument with my younger brother.
After warming up the car, I noticed a couple of tires looked low. “Great,” I said. “No problem.” We took it over to a convenience store and inflated the tires. On the way to my brother’s school, he mentioned that one tire which looked pretty bad would blow out. Not five minutes after he said this, it blew. Right on a busy highway. Well, we pulled over, put on the hazard lights, and proceeded to change the tire.
After the tire was changed, we climbed back in the car in the desperate hope that we could make to to class on time. As I tried to start the car, I noticed the hazards weren’t flashing, in addition to the fact that the car wouldn’t start. Because it had happened about five times in the past two weeks, I knew what happened. The battery was dead.
That really made my day. I had just proved that I didn’t need to call anybody for help, but here I was going to have to call. So we piled out of the car and started walking to find a phone.
As we walked, we joked about having to walk “miles and miles through wilderness in the dead of winter just for a stupid battery!” Actually, it was only about a thousand yards to the gas station, the “wilderness” was only grass up to about my ankle, and it was in the mid – 50’s outside.
Back in the car we waited. And waited. And waited. To pass the time, I pulled out the owner’s manual out of the glove compartment and read aloud, and you guessed it, waited.
Finally, we got the thing jump-started. Mark, my brother got to class (about two-hours late), and I just decided I wouldn’t risk attempting to come to class.
So I went around town trying to get everything in order so this would never happen to me again.
The place I settled on told me it’d cost about $50 to replace the tire, and my car went up on a hydraulic lift. I sat in the waiting room and read a magazine. A little bit later a guy walked in and told me the brakes on that wheel were shot. “What else?” I thought. He told me the other side was not much better and that the tire on that side was in about as good a shape as the one that blew (although it had air). That’s not all: the reason for the poor condition of the tires was a lousy alignment. Prognosis: $200-250, and that’s not counting the new battery I need!
On top of all this, I was going to pick my brother up from school in my dad’s car and guess what? A tire blew.
There’s an interesting addendum to Murphy’s Law (Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.) “When it rains, it pours.”
It really poured on me today.