It starts with a flat tire. Well, not really even a flat tire. More a soon-to-be-flat tire as you notice that your tire is slightly low when you walk out to your car. But you ignore it because you just don’t have time to stop to put air in it right now.
This is your first decision point. You could make the momentary sacrifice to put some air in the tire, or you can ignore it and carry on.
Left unchecked for a week or two when you finally do put some air back in the tire you will discover that it doesn’t seem to hold air anymore. Now you are having to stop every couple days to put air in it.
Finally you relent and stop at the tire shop to figure out what is wrong. Turns out you waited too long and the tire now has run-flat damage. You need a new tire.
Which is better than the alternative because if you had kept driving on that semi-flat tire in addition to run-flat damage eventually you would have hit a pothole that the flaccid tire wasn’t able to absorb. This would cause irreparable damage to the rim requiring a replacement wheel in addition to the tire. Your shop bill doubles and you have to wait a week without a car for them to order the replacement rim.
Thankfully you felt the vibration caused by the damaged rim, because left unchecked the semi-flat tire and newly-bent rim combined would conspire to damage your ball joints, universal joints, and other expensive suspension components that are laborious to replace.
Ignoring a slightly low tire will end up costing you thousands of dollars and many hours, maybe days, of lost time and inconvenience.
Think about that next time you decide to ignore a small thing in your body that could be solved by trading a few minutes of your time for a workout, or a check-in with a competent professional. I’m not saying you should pump the brakes at every little thing, but it might be worth checking in before you get to the third or fourth round of failure points.
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