Flat

I got my first flat tire in eight years of driving yesterday. It deflated completely in the five seconds it took to turn off my ignition, recognize a loud hiss, and open my car door. Naturally, since I’m only 29 years old, my first instinct was to call my mommy and ask her what to do. Even more naturally, being that I’m me, my second instinct, when mommy didn’t answer her cell phone, was to ignore the flat tire, lock my car, and walk the ten steps to the public library with its free wireless access and start catching up with my old pal the internet. (Oh internet, how I’ve missed thee!)

As soon as I got online, I got an IM from my best friend from high school (let’s call him . . . Garbo until I get his permission to use his real name or come up with a better pseudonym), and when I told him the situation he immediately offered to drive into town and change my tire. Now, I have some fantastic friends in DC. Really, really great friends who I know would do a lot for me, friends who have fed Sugar when my cat sitter couldn’t, planned celebrations of me, and found good homes for my plants. But none of them would in a million years offer to change a flat tire for me. It just wouldn’t occur to them when I could call AAA. I was still too happily engaged with my blog reading to take Garbo up on his kind and completely sincere offer, and preferred to indulge my denial for just a bit longer.

Eventually I started getting this nagging feeling, that maybe, just maybe, I should really take care of this. I squelched it for another hour and caught up on Go Fug Yourself. But eventually I tried my mom again. She was there before I could get pack up my laptop, attaching an air compressor to my tire and waiting with me for thirty fruitless minutes before we realized that the tire was losing air too quickly for that to be any use. So she gave me the number of our local Les Schwab (I’m pretty sure it’s a western franchise - I remember commercials from my Idaho childhood involving a guy in a white cowboy hat with a freezer full of steaks that he handed out with new tire purchases), waited while I called and they told me someone would be there soon, gave me a kiss, and headed back to work. Kyle was there in ten minutes, fixed my tire right in the parking lot in fifteen more, all for thirty five dollars that he felt bad for taking from me because if my leak had been slower I could have made it the ten blocks to the shop and he could have fixed it for free. And he wouldn’t even accept a tip! He didn’t give me a steak, but it was still a good deal. I can’t imagine I would have gotten that kind of service in DC. Right? Anyone had a flat in DC or another big city on the east coast that they can compare this to?

So in addition to all the kindnesses from friends, family, and Kyle, the absolute best part of the whole experience? The fact that I didn’t feel any rage. Never once did I want to scream HATE at the world for frustrating my day’s plans. (Ok, I might have IM’d a single HATE to a friend, but it was half-hearted, a reflex. I didn’t mean it.) After all, I wasn’t losing precious billable time, or even more precious free time. I didn’t have anything I needed to do, or anywhere I needed to be, and anything I wanted to do that didn’t get done, I could get to . . . whenever. No rage people, NO RAGE! Two and a half weeks without a job and I’m so mellow I’m practically in a coma.