Got Nailed

I didn’t catch the warnings it was showing me within the last couple of weeks: The heavy drag, the suspiciously higher gas consumptions, and the less than standard agility in which this hatchback shouldn’t have performed. On the surface it seemed to be all nice and dandy. Even flooring the pedal in the Kebun Jeruk – Karawaci tol strip, in which I have to patronize more than I wished for- Captain Righteous (my car) however, was still stable in every way. The grip was doing fine, even slicing through puddles of water were done at ease with no hazardous slip. But reaching 0-100 kmph was extremely slow compared to what Captain Righteous and I had achieved in the past.

So there I was feeling a little queasy after the long haul from Pondok Indah, I decided to make a left turn at an available Shell gas station. It shocked me to find out that the air-pressure in the back-right tire was only 18 psi. Sumthin’ was wrong. But I didn’t know how definitely scary circumstances were.

The next day, before going to work I managed to fit Captain Righteous in a tire workshop to see if anything had gone awry. Apparently, the mechanic said, the maker of the car had put some very nice brand of rubber as Captain Righteous’ footings. “It should’ve been flat like my worn out sneakers seeing what happened here!”

He extracted 6 (yes, six) nails from one tire alone!! The others were ostensibly fine.

Now I remembered.

The Permata Hijau overpass going to Pondok Indah are frequently hit by coward cons posing as nail-spreaders to milk extra cash from unwilling clients for patching their tires- when the going gets though. And this was the exact overpass that I had to go through every single day from home to work.

My stomach churned. I wanted to take my wand out and simply perform an ill-fating excruciation curse to whoeva did spread those rusty nails on public roads for their own gains.

But since I was tortured and forced to read a book by the name of Secrets (by Rhonda Byrne), I now need to have a positive outlook: I pray that these people (can I say dimwit here?), would soon realize that only bad things will come along by harming others. Ouch, for fuck sake, can I just do a stampede charm on them instead?

Back to the workshop then. He asked me whether or not I wanted a new tire replacement. I was like, “Can you just simply fix them instead with some chemical rubber hole-filler and hardener?”

Shall I worry? I mean, with the newly found six tears in the tire, it meant that the same tire had suffered 9 strokes in total (for it had 3 nail attacks prior to this).

Of course, according to the workshop mechanic, everything will be just fine.

Another one of those “This is so Indonesia!” moments.

Hidup tukang tambal ban!
Long live ye rubber patcher!