24th April 2007

24th April 2007. That was the day when one of the cars tyres went almost flat! Well, it was punctured by a tiny screw, one hundred times smaller than the tyre itself! I did not realise it at first until I saw the flatten tyre after I picked up my little boy from his playgroup. On realising the situation, I quickly went to the nearby petrol kiosk to pump up the tyre. It could still be pumped up! Luckily, it was in the morning so it was not difficult to look for a tyre shop to repair the punctured tyre. The last time, when I had a flat tyre in the late Saturday afternoon, I had a hard time finding a tyre shop that was still open at that time.

I searched through the Yellow Pages online as I did not have a hard copy on hand. Technology has helped me a lot, especially during such times when you needed some professional help. I managed to find a shop nearby which could do the repair. I called up the shop to make sure the shop was open. Then I rushed down to make the repair before the tyre went totally flat. The repair was pretty fast as it took the repairman or mechanic less than five minutes to jack up the car and remove the tyre. After the tyre was taken out, he rolled the tyre to his work station to remove the screw on it. He took out a thin strip of rubber from his work station, peeled off the backing and poked the rubber in to fill up the hole made by the screw. Then he pumped up the tyre. The next step was to roll the tyre into a big tub of soapy water. Know what is it for? It was to test for any more holes in the tyre.

Everything took me about fifteen minutes and eight dollars. :)