What To Do When You Have a Flat Tire

If you find yourself with a flat tire on your vehicle, this is what you should do:

1 - Notice the flat tire before you get into your vehicle so you don't have to drive out of the driveway, notice something is wrong, and say: "Oh CRAP!" in front of your children, and have to drive backwards down the street and back into the parking lot that you just pulled out of.

2 - Be immediately thankful that you have a cell phone (if you have one) and use it to call your brother who works with your husband (who is otherwise unreachable) over and over and over and over and over until he finally answers.

3 - Ask said brother to deliver your husband (who otherwise would be waiting for you to pick him up) to you so he can help change the tire because you can't figure out how to get the spare out from under the car. (You are otherwise very capable of changing the tire as you've done it several times before - all by yourself).

4 - Remind your bored and cranky children how lucky they are that they are standed at a park and not alongside the freeway as you easily could have been.

5 - Do NOT allow your teenage son to sit in the car and listen to his CD while he waits because he is so bored and too big to play on the equipment at the park.

6 - Be as helpful and cheerful as you can to your husband when he arrives as he is very, very tired and sore from a very long day on his feet at work, but also try to allow your teenage son to watch closely so that one day he will know how to fix a flat tire.

7 - Also remain cheerful and positive when your husband becomes angry at you because the car won't start because the battery is dead because you didn't follow instruction #5.

8 - Be a good backer-upper and steerer when your teenage son and your husband push your car across the parking lot to a space where there would be room for another car to pull up and give you a jump start.

9 - After the car has been jump-started by a kind stranger and you are finally on your way home, remind everybody how wonderful it is that everything turned out so nicely, when it all could have been so much worse.

10 - Post the entire incident on your blog for all your friends and family to read so that they may know that these kinds of things happen to everyone and it always makes for a good story to share when there would otherwise be nothing of interest to blog about, and hope that it garners a good batch of comments because you really don't get very many otherwise.