Een ongeluk komt nooit alleen

Or, for my English readers' convenience: an accident never occurs alone.

Yesterday, my dad asked me to push our trailer into the back of our garden, through the gate that is there. That wouldn't be a problem, but I miscalculated a slight bit, and ran the trailer's tire against a sharp end sticking out of the gate. As a result, the tire was completely ruined and had to be replaced.

So, we fetched the reserve tire and started removing the wheel with the broken tire from the trailer. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to be very easy – the trailer had had its current wheels on it since ages, and apparently some bits of it had become quite rusty. As a result, we couldn't get it off.

We used oil to try and get rid of the rust. Didn't help. We took a hammer and would carefully hit the wheel. Didn't help. I took a wooden beam, put it against the back of the wheel under the trailer, and hit it with a sledgehammer. We quit doing that when the beam had splintered at both ends (after I turned it around) and the wheel hadn't even moved a millimeter yet.

Finally being out of sane options, we hooked the trailer up to the car and drive it around the sand field where it was situated until the wheel fell off. That worked, but the wheel hit the mudguard when it fell off, which in turn decided that it would like a different shape. So we couldn't fit the new wheel on anymore – the mudguard was in the way.

I tried to use a crowbar to move the mudguard back so that the wheel would fit, but that didn't work; its elasticity was too high, I couldn't get it to move the way I wanted it. When we finally did get it to move slightly, that was only because it was breaking off. Now, a mudguard that isn't firmly attached anymore is a dangerous thing, so we decided to completely remove it from the trailer. Dad fetched one of his tools which would do the job, but when he had just started, it suddenly started to produce smoke... its engine had broken down.

This is really silly. What started off as a silly 2-minute job ended up taking about an hour and a half from my day, and didn't accomplish anything besides a broken trailer, a splintered beam, and a broken tool.

Oh well.