What do you do with your time while you wait for the ping?

I've been at this for a few years now and I still look for new and interesting ways to make my wait time quality time. I have found doing good deeds is a fulfilling past time that never gets old. Giving someone the occasional ride is easy, getting in the trenches takes a little more oomph! But really, there is nothing like bringing a smile to someone's face when you solve a problem instantly, which to them may have seemed enormous or even insurmountable just ten minutes ago. That brings real joy.

I have two ride share vehicles, the 328i (with no spare tire and limited trunk space) and the Cadillac six door limousine (huge space every direction) and do different things in each. In the Cadillac one of my favorite deeds is to help someone change a tire. When I am in the limousine, I am fully tricked out with a portable air compressor, air impact wrenches, a five ton air jack and one 3 bag and a 2 bag air jacks. I can have the car up, snatch a tire off and on and put her down in 4 minutes flat and need only four inches room to work in. The more pathetic the persons' situation, the funnier it can get. I have seen people trying to jack up cars too low to the ground for their jack to fit so they improvise putting the jack in places it shouldn’t be used. Some were downright dangerous, others ingenious if they weren’t expected to take a load of close to a ton. If you could only see the range of dodgy jacks and tools car makers provide for the DIY tire changer. It is awful. Puny little jacks with extensions you have to turn 10,000 times to jack a car up and the tire tool that is six inches long with a lug at one end. How are you supposed to even get leverage at 6 inche…

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I've been at this for a few years now and I still look for new and interesting ways to make my wait time quality time. I have found doing good deeds is a fulfilling past time that never gets old. Giving someone the occasional ride is easy, getting in the trenches takes a little more oomph! But really, there is nothing like bringing a smile to someone's face when you solve a problem instantly, which to them may have seemed enormous or even insurmountable just ten minutes ago. That brings real joy.

I have two ride share vehicles, the 328i (with no spare tire and limited trunk space) and the Cadillac six door limousine (huge space every direction) and do different things in each. In the Cadillac one of my favorite deeds is to help someone change a tire. When I am in the limousine, I am fully tricked out with a portable air compressor, air impact wrenches, a five ton air jack and one 3 bag and a 2 bag air jacks. I can have the car up, snatch a tire off and on and put her down in 4 minutes flat and need only four inches room to work in. The more pathetic the persons' situation, the funnier it can get. I have seen people trying to jack up cars too low to the ground for their jack to fit so they improvise putting the jack in places it shouldn’t be used. Some were downright dangerous, others ingenious if they weren’t expected to take a load of close to a ton. If you could only see the range of dodgy jacks and tools car makers provide for the DIY tire changer. It is awful. Puny little jacks with extensions you have to turn 10,000 times to jack a car up and the tire tool that is six inches long with a lug at one end. How are you supposed to even get leverage at 6 inches? I think we have become a people of AAA reliants. My 328i doesn't even have a spare tire. Have a car problem, call a car service.

Almost two weeks ago I was tooling down the highway and Waze told me there was a car ahead on the shoulder. As I approached I punched the Waze update that said the car was still here and slowed to assess the situation. It was a Toyota Corolla, probably 6 -8 years old, the brightest key lime pie green imaginable and with what had to be the largest African American woman I had ever personally seen, standing forlornly by a tire so flat it had come half way off the tire. I mean I don’t know how to exactly put it in words except to say SHE WAS BIG in allcaps. There may be larger women on TV but this was the largest I had ever seen with my own eyes. She was holding the little 6 inch lug wrench they give you, as though that were the culprit to her problem. Little did she know she would never get to the lug wrench portion of that affair. Her real problem was in the fact that the low profile tires she had, made it too low (with a flat) to get her OEM jack underneath it.  She would have been here a while. Without further discussion I saw the problem and moved to fix it. I backed the limo up jumped in the Corolla to lock the brakes and make sure it was in park. I felt like a kid in his Dad’s chair. The seat had been removed from it’s bolt downs and moved all the way back to the back seat and rebolted. The passenger side seat had also been moved back and shifted left. This essentially made two seats into one. There was no leg room for anyone in the back seat. The woman explained she sat in the middle of the front seat (one butt cheek per seat), drove with her left hand and shifted and did everything else with her right hand. I was amazed at the woman’s tenacity in wanting to be self-sufficient in transportation. Needless to say I made swift work of her tire change. The woman tried to tip me, but that would have taken away the pleasure of just doing a good deed for a person with an unsolvable problem. Just give them that little hand up, that little nudge. Pay forward your Karma. Thanks for your upvote.

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