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Proyecto Visión 21

“You will need a rather large budget to do that”

Francisco Miraval

“You will need a rather large budget to do that,” the expert told me. And, for reasons I will immediately explain, I almost believed him.

A morning last week, I discovered one of the tires of my car (rear, driver’s side) was totally flat. I called the automobile club I have been using for years and they sent technician, an expert, who arrived a few minutes later.

The expert used a jack to lift the car, took a look at the tire, and removed the nuts holding the tire in place. He just needed to remove the flat tire to put the spare one, but things got complicated.

He tried first with his hands and then with his feet to dislodge the tire, but he couldn’t do it. Increasingly frustrated, he kicked the tire twice, but nothing happened. He then took a large bar and use to see if he could move the uncooperative tire. He couldn’t.

So, he took an electric tool out of the toolbox of the tow truck he was driving and, using different attachments, tried with his new power tool to remove the tire. The unwillingness of the tire to leave the car was evident.

Now clearly frustrated, the expert put lubricant on different places of the tire, but that strategy didn’t work, not even after he used again his hands, feet, and tools in a new futile attempt. The tire was still firmly held in place by some kind of an invisible force, so to speak.

The expert gave up. He put some air in the flat tire and told me to go to a nearby car repair place where, he said, they will surely suggest I would need a new tire.

He also told that to remove the tire from the car they will need to use “high tech”, because they will need enough force for the operation and because they need clean the rust that created the problem. He said I would have to pay probably near $1000 and that the work would take two days minimum.

Since I don’t have that money and I can’t be two days without a car, I didn’t know at first what to do. But then I remembered a small care repair shop owned by two Latinos just a few minutes away. I went there, I explained to them the situation with the tire, and asked them if they had the high tech needed to repair it. “Of course”, they said.

One of them lifted the car and removed the nuts from the tire. Then, the other one took a small tire and threw it to the tire still “attached” to my car. The tire immediately move. While one of them repaired it, the other one used soap and a popular soda to clean the rust. They were done in less than 15 minutes and they refused to accept any payment.

Sometimes, experts don’t know what they are talking about and high tech is not the answer.

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