WannaBeGythaOgg

Phew, that was a close one

Turns out my front driver side tire was very bad. I know this because Joe, my brother-in-law, used the car Friday night to get to the store and as he was returning home, the tire blew. Not just fizzled to a flat...it BLEW. He was only moving at about 20mph, and still had trouble moving it out of the way of traffic to the side of the road.

I tend to drive much faster, of course, and have about a 40-mile commute from my job in New York - and generally, depending on the route I take, at least 35 of those miles are on the highway. So I figure it's only through pure luck that that sucker didn't blow out as I was clocking along at 60mph only a couple of hours earlier.

Not only did Joe get the car home without damaging the rim, the next morning he devoted several of his Saturday hours to changing the tire (to what unfortunately turned out to be only a donut spare), and then driving to Town Fair Tire and having them put two new front tires on (good thing he was there too - they tried to skip the "balancing" part of the procedure, and they would have managed to skip it had it been me standing there). Apparently the TFT technician was appalled by the state of my other front tire as well, and asked "Doesn't she ever check these?" to which Joe said he replied, "Pfft. Gas. Drive. That's her." They had a good laugh over this one.

In any case, not only was I not killed on the highway on the trip home, but I now have two brand-new front tires on my car (which withstood a truly nasty pothole on my trip to work this morning). If my husband had been the one to do all this for me, I'd STILL be hearing about what I owe him for doing it. As is usual for him, however, he wasn't even out of bed until 2pm Saturday, by which time Joe had been home from his post-tire-replacement trip to the store for two hours.

Thank you Joe!

posted by PratchettFan @ 6:43 AM