I set my alarm each night for exactly one hour before I need to be at work the next morning. This leaves me exactly enough time to not get a complete breakfast, miss most of Sports Center, and make it to work with a little less than two minutes to spare.
This system allows me to do things like, but not limited to: complain about being tired or having low energy levels all day;need a lunch because I didn't have a good breakfast; not know anything that's going on in the sporting World until someone brings it up.
Yesterday began no different than any other day. Wake up at nine for work at ten. Eat a single cookie, hold on longingly to the second one before putting it back, all the while telling myself that this was the place the battle would be won, this cookie would be the first of many victories. (I feel you should know that I am currently eating an ice cream.) Get dressed, take one last wistful look at the clock. Leave.
A ho-hum morning to the tee. I threw myself into my little Oldsmobile with typical abandon, put on my music and morosely pulled out of the parking spot.
The differentiating factor this particular morning was the UPS driver--who I imagine had, much earlier than I, gone through his own ho-hum morning routine and was now in a mental state that fell somewhere between utter anguish and happy pink butterflies. The point of that metaphor? He was taking up both lanes.
Being the astute morning driver we all know me to be, I reacted about ten seconds too late and flung myself up and over a (maybe) six inch curb. Something that should of, at worst, made my car complain the rest of the drive to work. "Dick move, Dave. Dick move." Yeah, it would have been annoying. But I would have understood.
Instead, my tire exploded like an overripe watermelon. It would be safe to say that it handled the situation poorly.
So instead of getting to work two minutes early, I got to work fifteen minutes late. And then, as my shift came to it's seemingly unreachable conclusion, I had to call my roommate to come pick me up, who, like any good mother, was at the door waiting and waving as I left the building.
Florida seemed to know exactly when I'd been forced into an outdoor situation, and immediately reacted with what I'll loosely call a "fierce heat." As I've long associated mind-numbing with cold weather and boring people and hate the word "sweltering."
As with most flat tires, I had to replace this one. In so doing I had to locate a spare, locate the jack, get the car up on said jack, get the wheel off and the spare on, the only difference between this and any normal flat-tire situation? It was like a rookie league pit crew. I had about thirty minutes to get the car into the shop and get it fixed.
This undoubtedly doesn't sound like a problem to most of you, but for me, changing a spare without a book telling me exactly how is a lot like putting LEGO's together without a guide. Sure, it'll look the same, but I always end up with fourteen extra pieces and a building that tilts to the left the ten-percent of the time it isn't tilting to the right.
Inevitably, we (my roommate was there for the whole ordeal, because he cares) beat the clock with two minutes to spare, an appearing theme in my existence, and got to the tire shop exactly twenty minutes after my appointment. But an hour and a half before close.
The guy, who I will jokingly (not really) call the Tire Douche, "spit his game" at me, as it were, for the next ten minutes. Wasting time as, at this point, I would have bought whatever the Hell he told me to. Instead, he pulled a super exaggerated "Captain Morgan" pose. He managed to get his leg all the way up to a counter that was a little higher than my waist. As if he wanted to say. "Look bro, I'm taller than you. Also, my cock is in your face."
Good times.
About an hour later, I made my glorious return to the land where Tire Douche ruled as King and finished paying for my tires, alignment and subsequent soul harvesting. He spent about twenty minutes reassuring me that I had done the right thing in getting tires. He did this despite me, after minute one (more accurately, second ten) telling him, "Yeah, they were not in good shape."
To which Tire Douche responded, "Good shape? Dude, you should play the lottery, I'm freakin' honored to be in front of you right now, man. You should have died!"
Awesome. But, he was right. There were small pieces of asphalt stuck in the glaringly obvious fibers sticking out all over the damn place. In places the tread was so destroyed that you could count the layers the road had chewed through. My tires essentially looked like they had been made of felt rather than rubber. Like someone threw out a couch and I said, "Fuck yes, I want that on my car."
Maybe I just care about the roads comfort more than you.
