Why We Missed Church on Sunday (Part 3 of 4)

After obtaining the necessary phone number, I got a hold of Josh who had been sick for the past four days with a hacking cough (which is why he wasn’t with me in the first place). Thankfully he had not yet taken his nighttime cough syrup so he was okay to drive. I sat in the Corolla with the doors locked and memorized Josh’s cell phone number while I waited for him to come rescue me. When he arrived, we were optimistic about changing the tire ourselves with the help of the instructions he had printed from the internet. We managed to get all of the crap out of the trunk and uncover the spare along with the necessary tire changing tools. Everything was going fine until we got to the part where you are supposed to unscrew the lug nuts. Josh tried and tried to get them off but, possibly due to his weakened state, they wouldn’t budge. We decided to take advantage of the free 24-hour roadside assistance that our car insurance offers and resigned ourselves to wait for the estimated thirty minutes it would take for someone to come help us change the tire. After about twenty minutes, and having seen a guy, possibly under the influence of some mind-altering substance, urinate on the air/water machine, we were getting impatient so Josh started wrestling with the lug nuts again. Since I was wearing real shoes and he wasn’t, he asked me to stand on the lug nut loosening tool (whatever it’s called) so that the leverage would be enough to loosen the lugs. It turns out that 135 pounds (yes that’s my real weight) was just the right amount. We also speculated in our most intelligent “sciencey” sounding voices that the metal must have cooled and contracted since our last attempts so even if we had tried this method before, it may not have worked. We got the tire swapped out with no other problems and called the insurance people back to cancel the roadside assistance that had not yet arrived. We decided to cautiously depart the gas station and head home. I agreed to drive the Corolla very carefully since there was basically a plastic tire on the car now. As I started to pull out of the driveway, I could hear some kind of scraping sound. My first thought was that we had done something wrong and now the car was probably ruined but then I realized the scraping was coming from the front of the car so my next thought was that the engine was probably about to explode because I had put too much stress on it by driving who knows how long on three regular tires and just the rim of the rear driver’s side tire… To be continued…