It’s been a while since I’ve dipped into Byron’s chronicles of adult misadventures.
We’re years away from the basement flood saga (which repairs on are slowly but surely coming together).
So it only figures that something ridiculous, yet comical, looking back, happened to me over the weekend that I think people might relate to or resonate with.
I was in Edmonton, coaching at youth volleyball nationals. As I pulled out of the hotel parking lot, I was looking forward to a great day with our team. I stopped for some groceries before heading on my way.
As I got onto the Whitemud, I felt a strange rumbling coming from my car. My first thought was that this road is bumpy and not well paved, probably just that.
Less than 10 seconds after that thought, my assistant coach looked at me and asked, “Is that just the road?”
In my nearly 20 years of driving, I have never once had a flat tire. I have never even been in a car where somebody had a flat tire.
but at that moment, I knew I had a flat tire.
Sure enough, I put my emergency lights on and went to check it out — my back right tire was as flat as a pancake.
I’m not always the calmest person in stressful situations and I knew I had to coach in about two hours, at a facility that was 15 minutes away. Panic started to set in pretty fast.
I don’t have AMA and being out of town, didn’t really have anyone I could call to walk me through the situation.
I turn to my assistant coach, “Do you know how to change a flat tire?”
“I think we can figure it out,” he said.
Which was said with oddly inspiring youthful exuberance and helped quell a bit of the sickness bubbling up in my stomach.
We popped the trunk, dug out the donut and all the tools required for the job.
Luckily, my car is relatively new, and I’ve never had a flat before, so all the pieces needed for the job were there. The jack was hidden in a side compartment but was too difficult to track down.
In a twist of fate and something that I now see as pretty serendipitous, I had seen a video on Instagram earlier in the week that explained when removing a tire, you need to keep it on the ground to use gravity to help loosen the lugnuts.
If this story was simply about changing a tire on the side of the road with cars ripping by and me having absolutely no clue what I was doing, it wouldn’t be quite as comical as it turned out to be.
The tire was changed in about 20 minutes with little fuss and we were on the road again.
(Only later did I find out that my assistant coach’s only experience changing a tire was when he was a kid, his mom called a tow truck to help them out, and he had memorized the steps.)
I think I had a rough idea of what to do, just pieced together from working on cars in shop class in high school and a job in my early 20s that required some maintenance on the vehicles. But all that wasn’t very confidence-inspiring.
Anyway, made it to the venue with lots of time to spare.
The next task was getting my tire fixed. Most tire shops were open that day, but not on Saturday. I wouldn’t be able to pick the tire up until the next day and figured it was best to get it put back on before I could drive back to Red Deer.
There were plenty of people who suggested driving back to Red Deer on the spare, but the thought of driving 80 km/h on the QE II was nausea-inducing.
Found a shop on Friday that said they could fix the tire, no problem. Great.
Saturday morning rolls around, I swing by the shop around 11 am.
Tire isn’t fixed. They haven’t got to it yet. Only two people working, big staff shortage. They can squeeze it in around 130.
Great. See you then.
I get a call 20 minutes later, tire is unrepairable. You can buy two new tires they say, but at a price I was not willing to pay. I wasn’t clear if the price was for one or two tires, but either way it wasn’t something I was willing to do. I also wasn’t clear if they could even put that tire on for me that day.
But luckily, I still had an appointment I had booked the previous day, in the hopes that they could put my fixed tire back on for me.
So I called my lovely and wonderful wife, who drove my summer tires up all the way from Red Deer, so I could get them put on at my appointment. She’s a gem.
In this moment, I was really lucky that I hadn’t changed to my summer tires yet.
So I head to the shop for my appointment at 330, only to find out the appointment was at 3 and they aren’t sure if they can now fit me in.
I pleaded with them, explaining that the tires were already on rims and it would be a quick swap.
They reluctantly squeezed me in and got my summer tires on.
The dead tire is now sitting in my shed because, in my panic, I told the mechanic that, of course, I wanted to take the tire home.
That day, I also learned what a wheel lock is and that my tires have one. A wheel lock basically means a special lugnut for which only you have the attachment. I think.
There are much bigger problems in the world. I was and am fortunate for so many reasons.
But I tell this story in hopes of giving you a light-hearted chuckle on a Saturday. It’s about a 35-year-old who had no idea how to change a tire and the panic that a full-grown adult really shouldn’t have when something so small goes wrong.
I have lived long enough to know things will generally work themselves out, with a little bit of sticktoitiveness and patience.
But on that day, one of life’s easy curveballs got the better of me.
Byron Hackett is the Managing Editor of the Red Deer Advocate and Regional Editor for Black Press Media.