It's a Road Hazard - AND a Tourist Attraction!

I had a flat tire last night. Bummer, ain’t it?

I was pulling out of the parking lot from work, and I knew something was wrong – you step on the gas, and the car goes, right?

Not this time. It was more of a “drag” than a “go”.

So I pulled over on a little side street, and there it was: a big silver nail, smiling back at me from the inside tread on the driver’s side rear tire.

Oops.

So no big deal – I’ve changed dozens of tires in my life. In fact, my Dad insisted that I know how to change a tire when he was teaching me how to drive. It came in handy, too – about a month after I got my license I had a full-blown blowout at around midnight, and that skill came in handy.

Anyway, I manage to get the car jacked up and the lug nuts off, but for some reason the tire won’t come off. What the hell? All of the lugs were off – there’s no reason why it shouldn’t just pop right off, like all of the other tires in this world.

So I did what every guy does as a last resort – I read the owner’s manual. It said if you have steel wheels, you need to remove the hubcap one way, or if you have aluminum wheels, you need to remove the hubcap another way.

Well, I have the factory original wheels – neither steel or aluminum. In fact, if I were a bio-scientist, I’d probably end up calling them “plasticus cheapus.”

So there I was – stuck with a flat tire that I can’t change. So I went to Plan B: I called AAA.

The nice people at AAA were very sympathetic, and said they’d get someone out there ASAP, which meant about 90 minutes. (Hey – I’m not complaining. It was primetime rush hour, and I was dead in the water without them.)

So I sat back in my jacked-up car, rolled the window down, and did my homework while I waited.

Now here’s the point of my story. (You knew that there’d be one, right?)

I sat out there on S 123rd Plaza in beautiful downtown La Vista, Nebraska for almost 90 minutes, and not one car that went around me stopped to see if I needed help. I didn’t really expect anyone to stop; heck, I probably wouldn’t have stopped, either. You never know what you’re getting in to these day when you stop to help a stranger.

Nobody stopped. But you wouldn’t believe how many people drove past, SLOWED DOWN, AND STARED.

Yes, apparently I was a big tourist attraction. They’d pull right alongside my disabled vehicle, slow way down, and stare at me and my wounded Sebring, as if we were some sort of broken down freak show. They’d then drive off, hopefully going home to share the lurid tale of the “mysterious car with the flat tire” with all of the other townsfolk, who were busy sharpening their pitchforks and lighting torches to go kill the beast.

The saddest part of this story is that about half of the cars that slowed down to stare had Iowa license plates. (Yes, after a while I began to notice.) Since we were in the heart of Nebraska, that makes the story twice as interesting.

Do you suppose all of these rubberneckers were calling each other? “Hey Ethyl – git yourself over yonder to Nebraska land. There’s this strange thing out thar – a car broken down!” (I’ve been to Iowa many times – believe me, broken down cars aren’t a rare sight.)

Long story short, AAA showed up, the driver got the tire off (turns out it just needed a good kick), and I was off and on my way about 3 minutes later, driving on my incredibly cool mini-spare tire: The Weenie Wheel.

I’m surprised nobody followed me home with an old 8MMM movie camera.