My daughter finished her final exams on Wednesday and so after work Thursday we headed up to New York to pick her up. We decided years ago to give up our SUV, keep smaller cars and rent something big when we needed it. So I started the morning by walking to the local rental car place because if I drove over there I'd have to drive 2 cars at once which I'm not good at.
As it turned out, I only got a few feet from my house when a neighbor drove up, stopped and asked if I wanted a ride. He has a very nice car so I said okay. He is also someone who smokes cigars while he drives, which I'd forgotten. I asked him how he was and that took up the entire ride. I gave him openings to ask how I was but he was clearly uninterested. I'm guessing his motivation is that he wanted to talk and preferred to have someone listening while he did so.
So I get the minivan and take it home and then off to work I went. When I got home a bit after 1, we headed out. There was no traffic at any point. We were speculating that this was because of all the GRIDLOCK ALERT - USE MASS TRANSIT signs on the roads, though how someone who is driving on a highway is supposed to stop and take mass transit is beyond me. You'd think that message should be imparted before you get on the highway.
We make one short stop and get to the dorm at 4:30. My daughter disliked her suitemates, so she decided to change rooms after this semester. She had been assigned a new room and was supposed to find out if we could just move the stuff over instead of bringing it home or back. She said it was fine, so we packed 2 sets of bags- dorm and home. This made packing the car kind of like a number squares puzzle, because the pieces all needed to fit and we needed to be able to get the dorm bags out without having to remove the home bags as well.
The loading and packing took about 2 hours, mostly because the carts the school offers to move things just barely fit into the elevators, meaning that if there was more than one other person in the elevator when it arrived, you had to just wave it on and ring again. There are 15 stories in the building and only 2 elevators, so you can imagine how often it was arriving completely empty.
But finally we finished, and we went over to the other building. My daughter went in to get her key; I hesitated to unload because I didn't want to unload the stuff and then have to reload it if it turned out that she couldn't get the key. Unfortunately, that turned out to be prescient, as there had been some sort of mix-up and the key was in an office which was closed by that time.
At this point, we needed food and my wife wanted pizza, so she Yelped our way to Koronet Pizza on Broadway and 111th Street. Koronet has an unusual way of utilizing resources because they figured out that the way to get the most pizza into an oven is to have it be one big piece, so their pies are (almost) as wide as the oven, yielding slices that look like this:
Yes, pizza bigger than your head (not specifically my head). Pretty darned good too.
Pizza in lap, we went downtown and out by the Lincoln Tunnel, which, by the way, seems to have approximately 43 different entrances, stretching from 9th Avenue and 40th Street to 11th Avenue and 36th Street. Pretty remarkable for one tunnel and almost too silly to be called confusing.
Then finally we were on our way, cruising down the Jersy Turnpike when, just a couple of miles south of Exit 11, the "low tire" indicator came one. I've had these in my cars from time to time, but this was an unfamiliar car, so I slowed down in case it got bad, and sure enough, it did.
So to set the scene, we're at Mile 90, in the cars only lane, on a shoulder big enough to fit the car and plenty big to get in and out of the car if you're Flat Stanley. Otherwise, it was terrifying, standing 18 inches from cars going 70 miles and hour. We called AAA and the ordered us up some service.
After about 25 minutes, a van pulls up behind us. A big young guy comes over, explains the costs, (like I'm going to negotiate, like no way I'm paying $30 for this. I've got a van full of clothing and supplies, I'll start a new life right here on the shoulder). Meanwhile, I'm thinking we're going to have to unpack the whole car to get the tire out. The good news is that minivans (or at least Chrysler minivans) don't have the spare inside the car. It instead hangs underneath, so total unpacking was not necessary). The guy tells me he needs to get in the driver's seat to lower the tire, so I get out.
"Why?" I say.
"I need to go get some equipment"
"What kind of equipment?"
"Well, we don't have a jack."
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. They dispatched a guy (the non-technician was just along for the ride) to fix a flat tire and he neglected to bring a jack. Why, one might ask, does he even need to remember to bring it? Do they not know who is working for them? Are there flat tires that can be changed without a jack? Are the service vans not loaded with at a minimum the equipment needed for the simplest of services?
Back into our own car we go and wait. After another half hour, the van returns and we feel the rear of the car start going up. I don't really think you're supposed to do that with people in the car, but hey, I'm not the technician.
Finally they come back to roust us, and I pick the tire up off the shoulder and somehow squeeze it into the packed read of the car. I then ask, what's the range on these donut tires? "Oh, around 50-60 miles." This sounded too vague for me, so I looked it up. Seventy miles seems to be a popular number. I then check Google Maps and how far are we from home? 71 miles.
Hmmm. So I ask if they think they have replacement tires at the rest area and they have no idea. They said if I called the rental company that they'd have me go back to Newark Airport because that was the closest open branch. I said no f---ing way was I going there because (1) by the time I got turned around it was 30 miles back to there, and (2) rather than replacing the tire they would almost certainly want to just replace the car, which would entail unpacking and repacking the entire thing. Uh-uh. I decided we should go for it.
My daughter was impatient to get home, but was mostly motivated to get to a rest room, as were we all. One of the myriad of ways you can divide people into two groups is that there are people who "do" other people and those who don't. By "do" I mean do impressions. My daughter is one of those "do" people, and she had us laughing the whole way to the rest stop reciting their conversations.
I should note here that 71 miles, while not too bad when you're going 70-75 mph, feels very far when you're going 50 mph, the max for the spare. But after an hour and a half or so, at 11:30, five hours after leaving Manhattan, we pulled into the driveway, spare intact. It had been raining steadily for most of the drive back (though not while we were standing on the Turnpike shoulder) and I uttered 6 words (three of them being 'no, way, and now'), lay down on the couch, pulled a blanket over me and the next thing I knew it was 1AM.
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