I have a fancy office job, for the last 20+ years my idea of a hard days graft was to sit in a padded chair in an air conditioned office, the most physically demanding thing I have had to do is walk to my car at lunch time. As I type this however, my hands are dirty, my once white T-Shirt is blackened almost certainly beyond any future use and sweat is pouring off me like I am Josef Fritzl on an episode of MTV Cribs.
I think I have said before that one of my life goals was to earn enough money so that when manual things went wrong I could pay an expert to fix them. I am an expert in very few things, sleeping, alcohol consumption and losing my wallet, so why would I do a half arsed job of fixing things around the house? It just isn’t my skillset.
About 25 years ago I had a summer job at a factory that made tractors. I was so bad at putting together the bits of the axel that I was responsible for I got moved to a role cutting the cable ties around the electronics. I messed that up most of the time.
So when Fred comes to me about 2 weeks ago to tell me his electric scooter has a problem with it’s back wheel I am less than overjoyed. This is yet another toy one of my children has that is entirely my fault they have it. Something you should know about me is I like Christmas, particularly giving the kids presents at Christmas. They get spoiled. Somehow I always seem to hit my biggest bonus of the year around October/November and that means they end up with presents like a $600 electric scooter, or a random hoverboard, or and I kid you not a 6 foot long human sized dog bed.
The huge dog bed is front of mind right now because as I sit in my office I can hear Laura shouting at Harriet that we need to find somewhere for said dog bed to go because we have a visitor coming and it can’t stay in the spare room. Honestly it is 6 foot long and 4 foot wide, we have a pretty sizable house, but even so there is nowhere this thing can go.
But I digress, back to Freds broken scooter. I promised him I would have a look at get it fixed one way or the other and he was OK with that. When I said it 2 weeks ago I meant it, at some undetermined point in the future. Yesterday however it became the most important thing in our families history and needed to be fixed immediately. This directive came not from Fred, but Laura, angry that I was working from home and she had to go into the school she decided to follow up on every little possible task at once because it was “on her to do list”. Firstly, all the jobs on the list are jobs that have been given to me, so it is MY to do list, secondly I am working from home, not having a day off. I had a full day of meetings, training, calls and tasks to be getting on with. Nothing on that list appeared more important than fixing the scooter.
Lunch time came and I took a break from work and I did what I do whenever I am doing anything like this, I watched 15 YouTube videos on how to fix it. This is common knowledge in my house that Dad watches YouTube videos on how to do almost anything. It seemed complicated. The tire that is flat is on a wheel that has the motor in it, its a monumental job. I called around four different bike shops to see if anyone would touch it and that’s when I realized I was in trouble. Not one person wanted anything to do with it. Apparently it is a tough job, that isn’t worth doing, it takes too long and nobody has any 8.5 inch tires.
Undeterred I went to Amazon, purchased a completely new wheel, with a tire already on so I can just change the wheel and thought while I wait for that to come I will at least take the rear wheel off and have it all ready to go.
Jesus Christ I am stupid.
Part of never doing any manual labor is that I have about 6 tools. None of which were even close to taking the nut off the rear axle (Super technical phrasing here I know). So what do I need? A socket set. Don’t have one. Another trip back to the computer and Jeff Bezos’ black hole of spending and a socket set will be with me by dinner time.
It’s incredible they deliver so quickly, and when it came I snuck back out to the garage at about 8pm to undo these two nuts then it should be simple from there. The fact I am dedicating a whole post to this means it obviously wasn’t. This socket set had sockets up to and including 9/16 of an inch. At best guess I would say these nuts are 3/4 of an inch, not..even..close… Time to pack it in and fight the good fight another day.
By the time I got in today the new wheel had arrived I had been to Home Depot and bought the right size socket this should be a 10 minute job from here. It took me 45 minutes to undo the first bolt, I swore a lot, I lost about 8lbs in sweat (it’s so hot here right now) and I am filthy, but with a great sense of satisfaction I did it, now just put the new wheel on with it’s fancy airless tire and jobs a goodun.
I have bought the wrong fucking wheel…. I cannot adequately explain how angry I am right now. The wheel doesn’t have motor on it, so if I put it on Fred has an incredibly expensive push scooter. So far this flat tire has cost me $139.67 and all I have to show for it is parts of a scooter spread across my garage, a T-shirt I can’t wear and a bad attitude.
I came in to the office sulking and swearing under my breath, closely followed by Laura asking me if I had thought about watching a YouTube video on how to fix it. That calmed me right down…
I’ve just ordered the right wheel and it gets here tomorrow morning before 11am. It was $114… I should have just bought a new scooter.
The Shroders in Florida 