Saturday, December 10, 2005

Women's Lib...of a sort....

Reading The Administrator's recent post on being a knight in shining armour and changing a tyre for two ladies reminded me of the only time I have ever had a flat tyre (so far!). It was a Friday evening in Amman, I had just driven up from the Dead Sea (which anyone who knows can confirm is the drive from hell...the only way I could describe would be driving round the M25 on a bank holiday eve, with one added drawback..you are climbing - steeply. The Dead Sea is about 1,300 feet below sea level, Amman is about 2,500 feet above sea level - the distance between the two is about 50km) so was feeling particularly grouchy and fractious, particularly as the roads in Amman were all slushy and slippery after the last snow fall. So we (my ex-boyfriend and myself) dropped off a colleague at his house and then headed to Safeways to do the weekly shop (how domesticated!)..as we trundled down the hill to Safeways I noticed the car wasn't steering exactly how I wanted it to, once we got into the Safeways car park (a feat in itself - particularly on a Friday evening) I had a quick look at the tyres...sure enough one of them was flat. So I decided to change the tyre...now my ex had never changed a tyre before (he couldn't drive) and had no idea how to do it...to give you some idea of just how clueless he was on this front, his first question was "where are we going to get a spare tyre at this time of night"..."try looking in the boot under the carpet!"...anyway, as I started to change the tyre with him standing and looking on, we were approached by a Jordanian couple (him in jeans and a jacket, her in full purdah) - the guy offered to help us.. so I thanked him and then expected him to crouch down to where I was working on the tyre...it was the woman who crouched down...rolled up the sleeves of her black outer layer and set to helping me....between the both of us we sorted it all out pretty quickly whilst her husband and my boyfriend stood around chatting about the state of the weather....

Either two very smart guys or two really clueless guys!!!

3 Comments:

Blogger Dusty Admin said...

Sorry, Mdm... I could never allow any woman to do that! I'm not one to believe that women are incapable of changing a tyre or anything other task but I have to say I see it as the right thing to do.

4:00 am  
Blogger Madame Chiang said...

Unfortunately when you have one guy that doesn't know how to and the other guy who probably won't...then if we hadn't done it I'd probably still be standing outside Safeway!

8:05 am  
Blogger Dusty Admin said...

I must have been the only honours level academic student who did auto shop classes in high school.

Even if I didn't have a clue I'd still do my best to help. It could have been worse... you could have been stuck in the middle of nowhere...

8:06 am  

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