I know the style and quality of every gas station’s free air machine within a ten-mile radius of my house.
There is a considerable difference between using a new free air machine with programmable pressure levels and digital displays and using the old models with a spring-based gauge and unreliable connection.
I also know which ones can be started from the machine itself and which ones require you to go into the store to ask the cashier to turn on the air (necessitating a sprint back to the car to get more than one tire’s worth of air before repeating the process again three minutes later).
One might presume that having an encyclopedic knowledge of local free air machines would make inflating my tires easier, but it doesn’t since the machines are so rarely operational.
A shameful percentage of my adult life has been spent either bemoaning the sad state of a gas station’s free air machine or crawling under my car with a cell-phone flashlight desperately seeking the black plastic air cap after knocking it over with the hose.
Now, that part of my life is over thanks to a 3-gallon oilless pancake air compressor I was given by my wife and daughter on Father’s Day.
I never expected to be the kind of guy who’d get excited about owning an air compressor, but here I am a hair’s breadth away from turning forty years old and this is what thrills me.
It is the perfect gift for me because it is something that will make (an admittedly small portion of) my life easier that I probably wouldn’t have gotten for myself but will forever enjoy.
How often will I need an air compressor? Maybe three or four times a year if you don’t count the awesome pistol grip blow gun attachment I have for cleaning dust and debris from hard-to-reach areas like the mower deck of my John Deere.
That attachment takes a weekly chore that used to have me getting down on my hands and knees and literally makes it a breeze.
But even without the blow gun attachment, those few times a year when I need to re-inflate my tires currently take up big stretches of my day.
There are 16 tires on my property (including a lawnmower, snow blower, and yard cart) that need regular inflating and only 8 of them (two cars) are easily transported to the gas station.
Even with my cars, which are mobile by design, I’ve struggled to line up the right conditions for getting proper air re-inflation.
The simple truth is that tire pressure issues almost always present themselves on bitterly cold winter days.
While it’s true that I’m home all day, my wife works during every daylight hour in winter so if I wanted the sun to provide a little extra warmth, I either have to leave the baby alone in the car or drag her back and forth with me while the clock times out.
I used to be able to do it during my lunch break, but stay-at-home parents don’t get lunch breaks. So despite being home all day, I still ended up this year fumbling about at night kneeling in the slushy mix that is a New England gas station parking lot in winter.
And spring maintenance on my riding mower didn’t make it any easier. What do you do if your lawnmower tire is somewhat deflated, you don’t own a mower-sized trailer, and the nearest gas station is several miles away?
In the past, I’ve borrowed a tool from a friend of my wife’s, but you can only do that so many times before you’re a leach.
My rationales for getting a new tool always involve elaborate discourses on the values of time and effort. If it is something I absolutely need, like a lawnmower or a snow shovel, I get it right away.
If it is something where owning it myself will allow me to avoid paying someone else even more money for the service (power washer, tree-trimming pole saw), it feels like a victory.
If it is something I would like but probably don’t need, I drop increasingly obvious hints in the weeks leading up to gift exchange occasions like my birthday, Christmas, or Father’s Day.
When they land, I feel like I’m being gifted a new superpower.
Tools make us masters; we must never take that for granted.
But masters of what? Masters of efficiency? Of our own homes? Of time?
Personally, I now think of myself as a master of air.
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