Flat!
I got out to my car this afternoon after work only to find that the front drivers-side tire was flat. Flat, flat. Not just a bit deflated, but rim-against-the-pavement flat.
So, I got out the cheesy jack that came with the car and my spare and started to jack up the car. Some guy stopped to help, which was really nice, even though I sort of knew what I was doing (I didn’t quite have the jack in the right configuration for maximal ease of use, but I was getting the car off the ground). Then I popped back into the office to look up a tire shop nearby so I could get the flat tire taken care of.
Back out the car again, I’m ready to drive the five miles to the tire shop. But the car isn’t happy….something’s weird with the spare. I think that maybe the guy helping didn’t get the nuts on tight enough or something, so I hop out to check on it.
It’s flat. The spare donut is flat. I’m screwed.
Fortunately, I work on a large campus, so I call the motor pool, and they sent someone out with air. Yay! A big thank you to whoever you were (I didn’t get his name) who came out to help a stupid woman who doesn’t regularly check the air in her spare like she should.
Then I was off to the tire shop. The tire had to be replaced because there were two tears in the side of it. I have no idea when that happened — I don’t remember anything happening on the way to work, and I don’t know how long it would have lasted with those two tears. Andrew wondered if it could have been vandalism, but the tears didn’t look clean like a knife-slash might look.