A Small Screw can Screw up you Day!

I woke up for work slightly earlier than usual this morning, planned out my day mentally in my head as I was brushing my teeth and was putting on my clothes when the houseboy called & told me that my car had a flat tire.....

I looked at my watch...6:55am...and with 15 minutes' drive to the office, I calculated that I woudln't make it to work on time this morning....and that's a polite way of saying 'I cursed the living daylights out of General Motors!'

So I walked out to the garage, and true enough, my poor Escalade was leaning to the front and left, the tire was completely flat, not an ounce of pressurized air to be found in it! I called the office, informed them that I would be late, and, as it was my very first time at replacing a flat tire on my 2004 Escalade (mashalla!) I proceeded (in Super-macho-Kuwaiti fashion) to take off my Gutra and extracted the jack & replacement kits.

Oh my God! What a terrible ordeal!

For one thing, the jack & turn bars are neatly tucked away in the Escalade's enclosure at the rear, but the spare tire is connected to the underneath of the chassis, held up by a pulley system that you access by using the ignition key to turn the security lock beside the rear number plate, and inserting one of the jacks rods inside and turning it loose!

Just reading the instructions on the car's booklet made me light a cigarette, just to keep myself from hitting my own SUV with the damn stupid jack!

By 7:30am my lovely family appeared, my wife looked at a distance at my ordeal with a sad face and an encouraging smile, while my 2-year old daughter was looking at amazement as to why the houseboy was underneath the rear chassis with his butt sticking in the air (I quicly gave up my macho attitute and consented to asking him to crawl down there and retrieve the spare tire while I unwound it with the damn pulley system thingy).

By the time the spare was lowered, I was having a can of cold Pepsi as a substitute for my usual morning coffee, I then instructed the houseboy to remove the flat, and within a few minutes, I discovered the reason why it was flat: A small screw was lodged into the seams. It was then when I remembered passing a carpenter's shop two nights earlier, so I must have driven over some loose tools and screws....

Long story short, I replaced the flat with a slightly less flat spare, got in and limped to the nearest garage, where I proceeded to have the flat repaired, the spare re-inflated, the Oil & filters changed, and the gear & brake fluid topped up...the best-spent 9KD's I'd ever spent on my car to date! To top it off, the mechanic gave me his number, and told me to call him whenever I experience another flat, and that he would gladly pass by himself and repair it on-site.

I arrived at my office around 9am, fully pissed off and dusty all the way up to my eyebrows! Not feeling like working my usual deskjob work, I decided to take one of my colleagues out for a couple of site visits, passing through Silicon valley in Hawalli along the way and buying a few networking devices in the process...and that made me feel better.

The morale of this story is; A small screw can screw up your day and a friendly stranger can make you feel insured & protected, but a networking tool that extends your home WIFI coverage can really make you feel good!