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Monday, August 13, 2012

Tit for Tat

As gracious as Andrew is (allowing me to post stories about him rolling around in...well, you know) he often feels that this blog is a little one-sided, that I only ever tell embarrassing stories about him, making me seem like some omniscient, pansophical, all-knowing author possessing infinite wisdom. And, yes, I just said three things that all mean the same thing.* So to even the playing field I'm going to admit that I know very little about cars.

Three-fifths of my immediate family is road-tripping across the country right now. Reid and Karen went along to help drive and take care of the girls. But don't worry; I'm not staying here alone with the baby--I've got my brother David and Andrew's brother Jacob keeping me company. Anyway, before they left on their trip Karen went to get the tires rotated.

Now, I have often heard of this being done...but I've always thought it was a bit of a ridiculous idea.

"Oh, I need to get my tires rotated," someone would say. And I'd smile at them like, "You idiot! Tires rotate on own all the time. That is the nature of tires," but of course I would never actually say that because that would be incredibly rude, right?

In my imagination, cars were being lifted up and having their wheels spun, a pointless procedure, really, because as I pointed out earlier that is exactly what tires are designed to do all the time. An abnormally large percentage of the general population was being duped into having their tires pointlessly rotated, which was a little unsettling since I try have great faith in human nature and so I began to think it unlikely that so many of us should be so stupid. So I got to thinking about it and figured that it was possible (though rather improbable) that instead of the whole world being stupid, it was just me. I was the stupid one.

I decided I'd ask my husband about it because he's gracious (I told you that already) so he's a safe person to ask stupid questions to because he won't make fun of you (turns out: he will) because there are no stupid questions (turns out: there are).

We were driving home from running some errand or another and I turned to him and said, "So, why do people get their tires rotated, exactly...and what do they do when they rotate your tires?"

He explained all about rotating tires--how you take the back tire, for example, and move it to the front, and then a tire from the right side of the car and move it to the left side of the car. You know--to ensure even tire wear, kind of like mattress flipping but for your car.

You should have heard the boy laugh when I told him what was going on in my imagination. He laughed me to scorn (and I laughed right along with him).

The upside is that my faith in human nature has been restored. Turns out the world is full of pretty smart people!

* Ironically, this line is from West Wing's episode titled "A Proportional Response." Ironic because this post is a proportional response.

2 comments:

  1. Haha, Nancy that is so funny. :)

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  2. lol. You wouldn't seem like the omniscient, pansophical, all-knowing author possessing infinite wisdom if you weren't. Except when it comes to tire rotating of course. :) Just sayin'.

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