gwax's rumblings

I had a rather ter­ri­fy­ing expe­ri­ence last Friday; I was on my way down to Woods Hole, chug­ging along in the left lane, mind­ing my own busi­ness when, all of the sud­den, some­thing was very amiss. It took but a few moments for me to real­ize that one of my tires had gone so I made my way to the right side of the road. So, there I was, in the right half of the right lane of I-93S, on a bridge with no shoul­der. I popped on my haz­zards and fig­ured that it was high time to inves­ti­gate the dam­age and get my spare on. It wasn’t until a few moments after I’d got­ten out to inves­ti­gate that it struck me that I was stand­ing in the mid­dle of the right lane of I-93S with cars within 5 – 10 feet going by at 70+MPH. The moment that real­iza­tion struck me i called 911 and climbed through my trunk to sit in the front seat with my seat­belt decid­edly on. There I remained, on the edge of a bridge, dead still, on the high­way, watch­ing my side view mir­ror as vehi­cle after vehi­cle nar­rowly missed ram­ming me off into obliv­ion. Eventually, after a num­ber of ter­ri­fy­ing min­utes, days, weeks, eter­ni­ties, ar how­ever long it was, a state trooper arrived and told me to sit in my car and wait for a tow truck. Fter a few moments of sit­ting through the same sort of ter­ror that I had endured wait­ing for his arrival, the trooper decided that he did not want to throw away his life wait­ing for a tow truck and instructed me to drive, in spite of a com­pletely shred­ded tire, to the next exit. At a speed of about 5-10MPH, I inched my way off the high­way and into a nearby park­ing lot where the recently arrived tow truck helped me get my spare on safely (hooray for full-sized spares). With my life intact, I was able to pro­ceed onwards and Cape-wards, even­tu­ally arriv­ing in Woods Hole.

Displeased that one of my tires had spon­ta­neously given way and plunged me into such a ter­ri­fy­ing ordeal, Monday morn­ing, I set out for the Sears Auto Center where I bought the tires less than half a year ago. I wan­dered in, explained that one of my tires had vio­lently given up on me and that I wanted to get it replaced, which earned me the infor­ma­tion that if I had Road Hazzard cov­er­age for the tires, it would be a free replace­ment but, if not, I would, essen­tially, be S.O.L.. Well, as it turns out, in a move totally unchar­ac­ter­is­tic of mmy­self, I had spent the extra $7 per tire to get Road Hazzard cov­er­age. Low and behold, an extended war­ranty was going to save me ~$100, that’s almost unheard of; usu­ally you spend $10-$20 for an extended war­ranty and the thing you buy lasts twice that long and then dies on you. So, I dropped the wheel and shred­ded tire off (luck­ily the rim was essen­tially intact) and made my way to work. I returned to the Sears Auto Center on my way home, picked up the new tire, paid $7 to renew the Road Hazzard cov­er­age and was on my way. The ser­vice and the sav­ings in this mat­ter alone have pretty much sold me on going to Sears for all of my tire needs in the future; I’ll still leave fancier work to my own machi­na­tions or less fast-food-esque mechan­ics, but for tires, Sears has a sat­is­fied customer.