Áilín Quinlan: Nuggets of advice I learned... just by listening, not scrolling

A word to the doom scrollers who don’t bother with small talk: never underestimate the value of random conversation.

Apart from the entertainment factor, you never know what you’ll learn.

I’d no sooner driven into the busy petrol station than realised I’d parked yet again on the wrong side of the pump.

Now I’d either have to reverse out and queue for the pump beside me, or haul the heavy tube over the roof of my car and force it into the petrol tank.

Frustrated, I slammed the steering wheel with the heel of my hand and swore aloud.

As I got out to haul on the tube, I saw a man at the next pump filling his big, gleaming SUV.

The man was laughing at me, but in the kindest possible way.

“I know why you’re laughing,” I grumbled.

“Why am I laughing?” he asked, grinning.

Ah God, I was always doing this, I told him.

Even when I thought I was parking so the petrol tank was next to the pump, I always ended up at the wrong side.

“There is a little petrol pump icon on your dashboard,” the man told me kindly. “Beside this is a little arrow that tells you what side to park at the pump.”

I looked at him, dumbfounded.

“Ah, that’s only something you’d get in big, new, expensive SUVs like yours,” I groused.

“No,” the man said. He was in his fifties with one of those knowledgeable but kind sort of faces.

“It’s in most cars now. I know these things,” he assured me.

“Of course you do,” I complained. “You’re male, aren’t you? You know everything. Plus, you’re never wrong.”

He laughed.

“Oh, all right,” I said and got back into the car and stared at the dashboard.

At first I just couldn’t see it.

Then I did. By Jove, there it was. A little petrol pump icon with an arrow beside it!

I got back out of the car.

“You’re right,” I told him, utterly amazed and extremely grateful. I had been driving this car for three years, I told him, and I’d never once spotted either the icon or the arrow.

Now there’s a useful little nugget learned from random conversation that will save me years of untold inconvenience and frustration.

A few days later, I found myself in conversation with a young electrician about punctures.

I was showing him the heavy black gadget with a kind of antennae coming out of it that looked like a mobile phone from the 1980s and which my husband had bought me.

I declared that I could use this to inflate the tyre whenever I got a puncture.

Oh, no, the young electrician explained, mildly horrified. This was only supposed to be used if your tyre pressure was down. It’d be no use for a puncture.

I gaped.

Well, I complained, my husband had just taken it out of the box, mumbled something about tyres, told me to keep it in the boot of my car, and failed to explain anything.

The electrician started laughing.

He said that he’d recently been working in the attic of a retail outlet. It was an extremely hot, cramped space.

At one point, he needed to balance precariously for a minute or two - virtually swinging in mid-air, he said, using one hand to hold himself in place and the other to work on whatever he had to do.

The very second he got into this position, the phone in his pocket started to ring.

He took a very quick look. It was his wife-to-be. The electrician ignored it. The phone stopped. Then it rang again. Insistently.

This was a signal that something was amiss. Still mid-air, he reluctantly put down the tool he was holding, reluctantly extricated the phone from the pocket, and reluctantly answered it.

He was a bit brusque, he admitted, given the circumstances.

In a panicked voice, his fiancée revealed that she had a puncture.

He momentarily considered asking her what the hell she thought he could do about her puncture, given that he was 100 miles away and swinging off a beam by one arm in an attic.

He decided against that course of action.

“Find the spare wheel in the boot,” he said tersely.

The arm he was hanging by was starting to burn.

“Take it out and lean it up against the back of the car.”

“Hold on, hold on, give me a minute,” she said crossly.

“Right. Ok, so I’m opening the boot now.”

His arm felt red-hot with pain now.

The attic was stifling.

“Right,” his fiancée sighed. “I’m taking the wheel out of the boot now.”

“God,” she complained, “it’s very heavy.”

By now his arm was threatening to just give up altogether and detach from his shoulder.

“Lean the spare wheel up against the boot,” he said very slowly and clearly.

“Now, stand away from the boot.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“A man will see it. He’ll stop and change the wheel for you,” he nearly screamed.

“Don’t be bloody ridiculous,” his fiancée retorted.

Two seconds later - and in a very different tone of voice – she said: “Oh. Erm, there’s a (well-known utility branded van) pulling up with two men in it.”

The electrician hung up.

That night she told him that the two men in the van had removed the punctured wheel and put the spare one on. They had then put the damaged wheel back in the boot for her.

They had daughters themselves, they explained.

They hoped that if they were ever caught like that on the side of the road, some man would come along and help them.

Lean your spare wheel up against the boot?

Worth a try when you’re in a real fix, girls.

See? The value of looking up from your phone and actually speaking to another person. You never know what you’d learn.