The Flat Tire

This is why I never get anything done. We spent about 3 hours at a friend's house today and when we walked outside to go to the souq to go shopping we had a totally flat tire. No problem, right? I mean, my Dad taught me how to change a tire and I am an independent woman who can handle things on my own.

So first we have to find the jack and stuff. It only took about 10 minutes to figure out how to lift up the third row seat but we finally found the tiny little jack that came with the huge SUV. So I take the thing to loosen the lugnuts but it's really small too and I can't get any of the lugnuts to loosen...not one.


Now if we'd been in the bush we would have persisted and figured out a way, but we weren't in the bush and a guy friend lives about 4 minutes away so we called him. I figured I would take the spare tire off the back of the car while we were waiting, then figured I'd go back to trying to loosen the lugnuts.

Oh yah, let me also add that this entire time we had an audience of men. They would walk up, stand and watch for a while and then say something like 'that's a problem' or 'so sorry' and then laugh as they were walking off. Not one of them stepped up to help. Oh no, because why would you offer to help when you could stand there and watch the white girls trying to do something that they obviously couldn't.

Finally after I put on a very dramatic show of carrying this huge SUV tire around and getting my clothes all filthy and then sighing really heavily every time I couldn't get a lugnut loose one guy stepped up and offered to help. After about 5 minutes he had to go get some different tools and, even then, it took him a while to loosen them all. After that I didn't feel so bad about not being capable of doing it myself.

When our friend showed up the local guy left and we discovered that the jack that came with the car was a little 'insufficient'. Basically it didn't even lift the car high enough to get the flat tire off, much less get the new one on.

After a few experiments with the jack we broke down and called our boss who knows how to do everything and who owns a halfway decent jack. Of course we still had issues after that and for some reason had to use both jacks at the same time to get the problem taken care of.

However, 2 hours and some sunburn later we finally got back on the road. And now I've learned that jacks only really work on pavement and when you live in a place where about 75% of the roads are NOT paved you have to find some flat rocks to help things out. I don't remember everything about the tire changing lesson I got when I was 16 but I'm fairly certain there was something in there about not putting anything under the jack, especially not rocks that break halfway through the tire-changing process.

I've also learned not to depend on any local man to do anything. I guess I just figured that finding someone who would help us out was a good fall-back plan...not so much. But that's alright. Once we get the car 'properly outfitted' with sufficient tire changing equipment we shouldn't need any help.

Sorry no pictures with this one. I should have broken out the camera to take pictures of the guys just standing around watching but I was a little busy trying to resolve the situation and didn't really have the opportunity.