Member-only story
THE A-Z OF FAILURES
How to Be a Failure (Part T)
Making the mistakes, so you don’t have to
Tyres
I learnt how to change a motorcycle tyre the hard way. It was in the days before the internet and YouTube videos, so I did not have a clue. But I had a puncture and a puncture repair kit and figured I could do it.
My first mistake was thinking I could do it, and the second was not fully deflating the tyre first.
My third mistake was to use kitchen spoons and spanners because I didn’t know there was such a thing as a tyre iron.
But eventually, I did manage to get the tyre off, repair the puncture and somehow, using brute force, get the tyre back on again. Yay!
No one could have been more surprised than I was when I travelled a few metres and the tyre went flat again. I got off to inspect the damage. There were some indentations in the tyre that looked suspiciously spanner-shaped.
Yep, I had managed to leave a spanner inside the tyre. The inner tube was damaged beyond repair. Honestly!
