Sometimes, just sometimes, Craig’s stroppiness rivals my 20 month old’s. Craig and I work so well because we’re both so moody, and can make each other laugh with our ranty dramas. We’ll whinge about anything and everything, and I’ll never get bored of listening Craig get on his soapbox. Occasionally though, he does take it too far and get a little too pushy with the gas supplier or the bank on the phone. I’ll hear him get louder and louder on his mobile, making demands, and generally being an obstinate prat – then I whisk Dexter away upstairs and quietly cringe to myself. Sometimes the people on customer services will hang up on him altogether (let’s face it, they’re not paid to get sworn at). Then it’s usually my job to ring them back secretly, apologise and try to sort out any outstanding problem we’ve got going on. It’s a good cop, bad cop routine we’ve got down to a fine art.
Last Friday however, something came up that almost ruined our weekend.
Craig works as a courier and is often hundreds of miles away from home over the course of a day. He’ll wind it up and take more local jobs as this pregnancy progresses, but for now, he could be sent to Manchester one day, then Birmingham the next. On Friday he went to Bristol, and upon getting onto the M4 on the way home noticed his tyre was punctured. He pulled over to the hard shoulder and rang me to say he’d be late back – I could literally hear the hail stones pinging off the windscreen in the background.
Given I wasn’t with the bloke when the incident happened - here’s a more jovial pic of some old tyres - does it get anymore clever than this? Via Fishki
Being a bit of a man’s man, Craig decided to change the tyre himself. Despite me begging him to call the AA, he insisted it was a 15 minute job and set to work. I’ve seen Craig change a tyre before and knew he was capable, but I was worried about him being on a busy motorway, in rush hour, in terrible conditions. I was also worried that I would get stuck on night duty with Dexter who had gone systematically about giving me the biggest migraine known to man since 9am that morning – but I’m reliably informed by Craig that isn’t relevant to the story.
The phone calls stopped after that. I tried to reach him an hour later to make sure he was back on the road, but there was no answer. Thinking maybe he was just ignoring my calls, I begged a few of his mates on Facebook to ring him. But no, I didn’t hear from him again until he stepped through the door at 10pm. Even accounting for the tyre problem, I’d been expecting him home some four hours before.
It seems my poor old man had had a right time of it. After eventually getting his spare tyre on the van, he spotted that too was punctured. He managed to flag down a highway agency vehicle but they were reporting to a serious incident so weren’t too impressed they’d been signalled over. Having no other option, he phoned the AA and they came with a lorry. An hour and a half after the initial blow-out, his van was getting a piggy-back to the nearest open tyre dealership, and Craig was suffering his own private blow-out in sympathy.
It was here, in the tyre dealership, that Craig’s patience wore a little too thin. Having no ‘good cop’ around, he wound up being stuck with a hefty tyre bill and had ran out of people to argue with. I love my stroppy man to pieces, but his charm doesn’t seem to have the same effect on work-hardened blokes in grubby little tyre yards. Let’s face it, the guy could basically charge what he liked – it was an emergency, Craig had his back to the wall and hadn’t done a good job of looking suitably grateful that the guy had stayed open late for him on a Friday night.
After all this – when he finally came through the door looking bedraggled and seriously angry – I stuck the boot in and put the entire sorry episode down the fact that he insists on using his friend’s tyre dealership where he’s only ever able to get sorry looking part worn tyres for extortionate money. That was the final straw for a hungry, miserable and exhausted Craig, and he refused to talk to me again until Saturday lunch-time.
The moral of the story is – make sure you’ve got a quality spare with you at all times. Get to a reputable tyre dealership and buy as new, not part worn. Even Craig had to admit defeat when I showed him the Point S website and he realised how much cheaper it is to buy from a bigger dealership. I learnt a few other things this weekend too, namely when to shut my mouth, and when to beg the mother-in-law to take Dexter off my hands for an hour! I think we were both bordering on breakdown territory that night – not least because of our respective inability to ask for help.
In association with Point S
