Emergency Man With a Van Planning After Blowout!

I had my second sudden blowout yesterday on the way to delivering a load  for a customer. The first one was with the Opel Astra Van which had brand new tyres, the tyre which blew yesterday wasn’t new, but had a huge amount of thread left so wasn’t expected at all. As luck would have it, this journey was the only one I had undertaken in that van without the spare tyre. I had a custom built cage made for the back of the van which carries everything from blankets, to ratchets and of course the spare tyre. It’s positioned at the door of the van so as well as having everything for securing and covering furniture pieces at my hands when loading, it also means that if the spare tyre is needed when the van is full, it will be right there. When loading from their unit in Elephant Storage, it was almost game over in Tetris until I suggested, instead of having to do a 2nd run and it costing the customer more, to take the cage out, keeping it in their unit and I could return for it later.

10 minutes after setting off to Greystones, this happened:

According to the iTronics Dash Camera software, I was travelling 107kmph, quite fast to have a blowout! The tyre was in shreds and now I had to sort out getting the load delivered to the customer and arriving to the next customer with as little disruption as possible to their day. The first thing was of course to get the replacement tyre so instead of having to wait what could be half an hour for a taxi or an hour for the AA (who couldn’t really do anything without a spare tyre) I gave a call to my friend who lived near by. Minda ran to meet him and got a lift to his own car which he could then go back to the storage centre to collect the tyre with and come to me. There was still the problem of a delay for the next customer though.

My brother just happened to ask me for a lend of the van this weekend to move himself, so in the name of efficiency, I called him to see if he was free to do the next job. He was, thankfully, but then I realised I had both sets of keys on me for the other van as I was using both in the morning, yep, me who was stranded at the side of the motorway. So Minda had to go on a quick detour to get my brother to bring him and the spare tyre to me while in the mean time I had to ring my insurance company to do a 24 hour temporary transfer from one of the vehicles to Minda’s car to allow my brother to be able to drive it legally back to collect the other van. After catching some sunshine sitting on the grass they finally arrived, along with another friend who I also called to see if he was around to help, but he just happened to stay the night in my brother’s, so couldn’t help but then got a lift and hopped off at the next exit to go home as my brother turned back around to head for the other van!

So after all that the 2nd job was only delayed by half an hour and of course the delay with the job I was on at the time, but discounts were of course applied. We managed to make it back on time to Elephant Storage 10 minutes before they closed to collect the cage so it all worked out pretty well in the end!