Dec 26 2008
Snow Chains and Loathing
I consider myself a pretty easy going guy. There aren’t that many things that I loathe in life, but one of those few eye gougingly frustrating things is putting snow chains on car tires. You see, it normally doesn’t snow around the Seattle area, but once in a great while a winter comes along that sheets the streets with snow, which is driven over by numerous cars and turned into ice. This is where the tire chains come in.
The car in question is a tiny little Nissan that’s roomy on the inside, but has wheel wells that an infant would have trouble squeezing their hand into. It’s a combination of factors that adds up to my severe loathing of this procedure. It says that it’s supposed to be easy on the box, but that’s a ball faced lie. First you have to untangle the coiled mess that you pull out of the bag and then sit down in the snow and dampen your pants up, making them uncomfortably cold, then slip the chains out of your sight and around the tire.
Fastening the chains together involves moving the car and even then you might not have them on tight enough to avoid the chains banging on your wheel well with every single rotation. Taking them off is particularly infuriating for me, partly because I can’t see anything behind the wheel, and so, can’t unhook the simple catch on the cord that holds the chains on, and partly because when I’m wet, cold, and dirty all at once I’d rather get the job done as quick as possible but that won’t happen because when all’s said and done I still have to spend another twenty minutes being damp and pissed to get the other tire chain off. It may not make sense to you, but it bugs the crap out of me.
