Complacency

I was trying to fix a puncture on my bike the other day, just a week or so after I had already fixed another puncture on the same tyre. Yeah, welcome to the UK, where the national sport seems to be covering the sidewalk in glass shards. Thanks to this, each commute feels like a dice roll. As you can guess, I'm no stranger to fixing punctures, and at first it was the same as any other time. I had done the patching, put back the inner tube, the tyre, all looked good, and then I start pumping. With my back turned to the wheel, I kept my eye on the pressure gauge of the pump, counted 1 bar, 2 bar, nearing 3... Now at this point is where I heard some sort of rubbing noise coming from behind me, I turned around and what do I see, if not the inner tube. A strange sight that was, and it took me a moment to process what I was seeing, because as the name suggests, and inner tube is supposed to be inside. Well, this one wasn't, at least not fully. It was poking out in one spot, all ballooned up, just waiting to burst.

Time came to a complete stop as I considered my options. Do I rush to the valve and try to let the air out in an attempt to save the tube? That was the first idea that came to mind, and thankfully not the one I acted on, realizing that putting my face near a bike's inner tube that could explode at any moment would be a pretty stupid thing to do.

And so I stepped aside and waited. It was one of those extremely uncomfortable situations we sometimes find ourselves in, where we know something catastrophic is about to happen, but we can do nothing but wait. In what couldn't have been longer than 3 seconds, the inner tube exploded with a bang loud enough that I'm pretty sure the whole street heard it.

I guess I must have gotten the tube pinched between the tyre and the rim, a mistake not that uncommon when doing this repair. There were so many ways this could have been avoided, but I'd done it enough times where I felt I could just half-ass it and still get the same result. I took shortcuts, I got complacent, that's what happened. I suppose I'm writing this as a cautionary tale for myself and whoever may be reading this: give things the attention they need, especially if they are not without risk. This wasn't really an expensive mistake, I just hate that I destroyed an otherwise perfectly fine inner tube. To add salt to injury, examining the tube one last time I saw the freshly applied patch, with what I'd describe as an absolutely perfect seal.