I was one hour into my five-hour drive home from Atlanta when I noticed that one of my tires was losing air pressure. Even worse, the rate of loss was increasing, so while I thought at first that I could make it back home and deal with the issue later, it soon became clear that I needed to get off the highway. I took the next exit and checked my tire in a gas station parking lot, and found a large nail in it. It was more than I could fix myself, and my spare tire is one of those small ones not suited for long distances. Fortunately, since I wasn't too far from Atlanta, the area was pretty built up and there were several tire shops around-- I counted three just near the exit. Unfortunately, since it was 7 PM on a Friday, they were all closed.
I was marooned in an Americana wilderness of parking lots and plazas. I was pretty stressed at this point, but eventually I asked myself one of the questions I often use while planning things: what's the worst that could (reasonably) happen? The tire shops were right there, so all I needed to do was wait until they opened the next morning. There were plenty of stores and restaurants around, so I could get dinner and maybe even watch a movie or buy a book somewhere. I had a sleeping bag in the car so I could even get some good rest that night. It started sounding almost fun! However, I couldn't in good conscience consider myself stranded unless I made a genuine attempt to leave. Robinson Crusoe's adventures would seem much more artificial, for example, if he had the option to leave the island any time he wanted.
So, I looked online for all the tire shops in the area, and found one only two miles away that was still open. It had a lot of good reviews, and from the website (particularly the font choice), it looked like a locally-owned business. I called ahead to ask if they could do something about a nail in my tire, and they told me to come on over. When I pulled up to the shop, the guy I had talked to on the phone was outside waiting for me, and he seemed pretty friendly. The shop itself was a garage filled with stacks of tires, with a hydraulic jack out front to lift cars.
Since the nail was stuck in the edge of the tire, the diagnosis was that it couldn't safely be patched, so I needed a replacement tire. This ended up being quicker and cheaper than I expected; I drove away twenty minutes later with a fresh tire, $50 less, and an amiable wave. As I got back on the highway, I felt happier than I would have if I hadn't gotten a nail in my tire in the first place. Maybe it was the relatively painless solution to what I imagined would be a terrible ordeal-- after all, who doesn't enjoy a rollercoaster of emotion every now and then?
