Last week, I got stranded on the cold streets of Omaha for hours due to a flat tire. The incident taught me, the hard way I would say, how important it is to prepare for the worst cases.

What happened?

On Thursday, I drove my wife to work. Upon leaving the building, we started to hear thumping noise from the car. The noise kept getting louder and more frequent as we went. I knew there was something wrong, but we continued on as my wife’s office was just 10 minutes away from home. Once we got there, we realized that we got a flat tire. Fantastic start to the day, but little did I know that it was just the beginning.

I told my wife to carry on with her business and let me handle the incident. Obviously, I called my insurance company. They told me that since I had no spare tire, the only solution was to be towed to a nearby shop. 45 minutes went by and there was no update on an ETA. I started to panic. I opened another tow request through the State Farms mobile app and called around 10 other local shops. They either advised me to get there first or have a spare tire so that they could come to me and fix it. Jensen Tire and Auto said that they could come to me with a spare, but it would take 24 hours as they were so backed up.

Back to waiting.

After two hours, State Farms sent me a voice message saying that they could not find any tow provider. As a result, I would have to figure things out on my own and then they would reimburse me. Desperation, frustration and fatigue (I had nothing but coffee and water on Thursday prior to the incident) began to kick in. While I was trying to figure out who to call next, a couple of police officers knocked on my window. They kindly asked what was the problem. After explaining to them the whole ordeal, they said they would call a tow for me and they would not leave until help came.

I didn’t think much about it, but 45′ later, the help actually came. The driver took some photos of my car, loaded onto the truck and off we went to a Discount Tire two miles away. He told me that there were 270 cars waiting to be towed and mine was the sixth that he towed that day and he started 6 hours prior. So one car every hour. The reason why I was picked up was luck. Because my request came via the police, it became a priority. Had the officers not called on my behalf, I would have still been waiting. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but I’d take it.

Predictably, the tire shop told me to come back in 2 hours because they were swamped with customers and requests. So I had to take an Uber home. It came as a complete surprise to me that there were no drivers on the roads. It took 45′ for me to get a ride. Lunch rarely tasted better. And if you thought that was the end of my trouble, you would be as wrong as I was.

Around 2PM, snow started to pick up fast and furiously. I could see the visibility deteriorate from my office. So I called the shop to ask if I could pick my car. They told me to come around 3PM, so I began looking for an Uber. An hour passed with no luck. Then, I remembered a colleague was in the office and was going home any way in his truck. I asked for a ride and he graciously agreed to help.

The roads were in a much worse shape than in the morning and traffic was no better. A 15-minute distance took 45′. Words couldn’t describe how grateful I was to my colleague. I found my car fixed and covered in ice and snow in the shop’s parking lot. I felt so stupid that I didn’t have any tool to remove the snow and ice from my windows, but I had to do it if I wanted to drive. And my wife was waiting for me to pick her up. So I used whatever I could find in the car to complete the task. My hands were so cold that I thought I would lose them. I found an old glove (not a pair, just one) in the car. So I put it on one hand and stuck the other hand in my mouth to give it a little reprieve. Gross, I know, but the hands felt better.

When the car and I were ready to go, I left the tire shop for my wife’s office. The roads were treacherous, the visibility was limited and the car was difficult to handle at times due to its being a front wheel drive and a lot of snow. An hour later, we both finally reached home and felt nothing but relief.

My mistakes

I made two stupid mistakes a long time ago that led to the struggle yesterday: I did not have a spare and I did not know how to change tires by myself. The former is the much bigger mistake of the two. Had I had a spare, someone would have come to help me change it and I’d be home much sooner and save myself $500. But the fact and the matter is that I did not have a spare. I set myself up for a spectacular failure. I never thought I would be in the situation I was in on Thursday. 

Morgan Housel said in “Same as ever” that “the biggest risk is always what no one sees coming, because if no one sees it coming, no one’s prepared for it; and if no one’s prepared for it, its damage will be amplified when it arrives.”

The impact was truly amplified by the horrendous weather. I learned that lesson the HARD way. The whole saga prompted me to review my and my wife’s life. We need to see what we can prepare in advance for some terrible scenarios, no matter how unlikely and what we can do to lower risks such as single-point failure risks. I am pretty sure we will not cover for every scenario, but we’d be stupid not to try our best.