Murphy’s Law strikes again

Let me tell you about my morning…

Last week sometime I noticed that the air in my left front tire was low. After a week of forgetting to take care of it, I finally decided to stop by the Chevron station near my apartment to top off the air.

I pulled up to the air compressor and hooked up the nozzle. I noticed I was down to 20 lbs of pressure… not good. So I pressed the button on the nozzle to fill the tire. I could hear air hissing, but couldn’t figure out why the little meter was still reading 20 lbs. After a few seconds of this, I realized that I wasn’t putting any air into the tire, I was letting it out!

I checked the nozzle, and it turns out there was barely a trickle of air coming out of the nozzle…certainly not enough to actually fill the tire.

By this time the tire is so low I’m not comfortable driving on it at all. I went into the gas station to talk to the attendants to see if they could help me. It turns out that someone had run over the nozzle on the compressor and broken it. Apparently no one had bothered to put up a sign, so it wasn’t readily apparent that the thing was broken. One of the attendants checked on the compressor and turned it on, but when I tried (again) to fill the tire after letting the compressor fill again it just continued letting air out of the tire. So now the tire is dangerously low on air, and yet the attendants are both telling me that I should be able to limp my way to the next gas station to get air.

I’m so not comfortable with that idea as by this time I’m practically on the rim, so I decided to put on the spare and head up to Les Schwab. So there I am in the parking lot of the Chevron (which has a garage) trying to change out my tire, it’s pouring down snow on top of me and neither of the idi… er… attendants on duty is bothering to offer any sort of assistance that might possibly force them to leave their nice warm station.

Long story short, after wrestling with the flimsy little jack that came with my car I finally got the spare on and got on my way to Les Schwab.

Now this is the part where I rave about how awesome Les Schwab is. I pull in, tell them my story, and within 30 minutes I’m back on the road and on my way to work. They even took the time to make sure the tire I was originally trying to fill didn’t have a leak or anything in it. They also pointed out that I need new tires all the way around, but didn’t hastle me when I told them I would have to wait. The tires are showing the wear bars, but I figure I ought to be able to get another six or so months out of them before they’re beyond all hope, which will give the boss…er… wife and I time to budget in new ones.

All in all I was only late for work by about an hour, which wasn’t as bad as it could be. My day has improved considerably and if nothing else I have an interesting story to tell.

Certainly it is a lot warmer.