I was on the way back home after lab when i bumped into Weiliang and David. It’s been a while since we caught up. We first stopped at their workplace Munchie Monkey’s.The manager was around to, guess the culture there is pretty slack, seems nice actually! When Weiliang’s gf arrive, she didn’t really like the food there and we changed to the jap place @ yih. Never eaten there before, even when it was Genki previously. I was suspecting that the sushi wouldn’t be fresh given the lack of crowd but it was ok, didn’t turned out that bad, their California Roll had to be self wrapped which was interesting though troublesome! Once again, it was really the signs of being a hermit / mountain turtle.
When we were leaving, all of us decided to take advantage and take a lift from Erwin, sort of along the way since he stays in the East so could drop us off along the way. When all of us gotten quite comfortable in the car, a cleaner nearby stopped us and told us the tire was punctured. Erm… so we got 4 guys and 1 girl and as one might have guessed, none of the guys had prior experience with changing tires while the girl had observed her friend did it before. Erwin was initially contemplating whether to continue driving off despite the flat but we convince him not to as it would be bad for the rim and he stayed a distance away. David was rushing for time to meet Jayne so he took a cab and left first. And thus begun the first lesson of the day!
Lesson 1: Ask for Help!
As mentioned above, the 3 guys had no experience with tire changing, but those days watching tv shows and movies must have helped somewhat so we unloaded the spare + the tools needed from the boot. This is where previous experience counts as certain things must be done in sequence, for example, you cannot unscrew the wheel after the car has been jacked up. Anyway, even unscrewing the wheel wasn’t easy as you actually sort of have to jump on the crank to loosen it. Initially we weren’t able to do it, lol and had to sought help from another cleaner who showed us the way, he was like kind of our saviour because we really had no idea how to remove the nuts.
Lesson 2: How to Change a Flat Tire
After that was just a matter of patience and lots of grime, sweat and dirt as we jacked the wheel up then change it. Think we put the jack at an inconvenient place and it was quite hard to raise it up but we managed to get it done through some ingenuinty with other equipment. There’s actually a metal area for you to position the jack so also that you wouldn’t damage teh car. With the new wheel in place, off we go! And as mentioned in the title, guess this is really one of the more important lessons which NUS doesn’t really impart to us. Oh, the driving school does have a lesson on this, like what if your car breaks down and what not, but I took private, so I’m excused!