THE A-Z OF FAILURES

How to Be a Failure (Part T)

Making the mistakes, so you don’t have to

Annie Trevaskis
4 min readFeb 26, 2023

--

A black board with white tile letters spelling out: “We all make mistakes and that is ok. we are learning.” The A in mistakes is upside down.
Image by rawpixel.com

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.

Photo of someone kneeling beside a motorcycle tire, with a spanner in her hand
Photo by cottonbro studio: on pexels.com

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!

--

--

Annie Trevaskis

I came, I wrote, I conquered. That last bit might not be true, but at least I am putting up a good fight.