Personal Roadside Assistant
December 28, 2023 – Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
Keith Hutchings was a calculator. Every move he made was based on probabilities and projected risks. He was perfect as a remote analyst for a Nevada bank. He made the final decisions regarding loan requests, extensions, and foreclosures. In his final hour of work before a post-Christmas vacation, he quickly reviewed four accounts close to asset seizure and liquidation.
For Keith, the financial numbers for all four cases were clear. He skipped over the written appeals sent in by bank customers, which were always about one personal tragedy or another. Keith concentrated on missed payments and asset values. As he sat in his comfortably heated home office, wrapped in his leather, zero-gravity chair, the names on his computer screen did not register as real people.
The first two cases were home foreclosures in a development named Yucca Estates. Keith scrolled through loan payment histories before saying sarcastically to himself, “Looks more like Yuck and Mistakes. No way they keep those houses.”
The third case was a loan to a failing steakhouse. Keith looked through six months of records and mumbled, “Their payments are rarer than their T-bones.”
The last case involved a loan to a towing company in danger of losing their truck. Keith concluded with, “These financials are a total wreck.”
With the click of a mouse, he pushed all four accounts toward asset seizure. Then he yawned and logged off from his corporate account. With his work complete, he could concentrate on his upcoming family trip. He planned it with the same precise calculations he used at the bank.
Keith had crunched the numbers and determined it made sense to rent a minivan for his drive to Southern California. With the available company discount from Enterprise, the cost per mile was low enough to justify leaving his older, family minivan at home and traveling in a newer, more comfortable model. Keith also planned for all meals and daily activities and could put an exact price on the fun they would have.
The rented minivan was already parked in his driveway, so Keith and his wife set to work packing in luggage and deciding where their four children would sit. To avoid aggravation, the ten-year-old needed to be as far away from the eight-year-old as possible. Same thing with the six-year-old and four-year-old. They were all loaded and on the road by 6:00 the next morning. The first hours passed as projected, with everyone listening to a family-friendly podcast dedicated to road trip stories.
Keith’s travel itinerary included a lunch stop on the outskirts of Las Vegas around noon. He paid for hamburgers while his wife and children used the bathroom. They were allowed eighteen minutes to eat once the food arrived. Then it was back to the road.
Keith and family quickly left the crowded chaos of Las Vegas as they sped south on Interstate 15. Nothing but desert surrounded both sides of the freeway. Keith peered toward the mountains beyond the desolate landscape, satisfied that he was three minutes ahead of schedule. Then he felt the minivan’s steering wheel pull slightly to the left. He was trying to ignore the pull when he heard a new clicking noise somewhere on the left side of the engine.
“Do you hear that?” Keith asked his wife.
“Hear what?”
“Click-click-click. Maybe it’s just the road.”
Keith could not decide if the almost imperceptible noise was getting louder. Then he heard an unmistakable KA CHUNK. An alert about tire pressure flashed on the dashboard display. The left front quickly lost pressure. In a matter of seconds, it dropped from 30 to 10 psi.
Survival instincts instantly overrode the calculation circuitry in Keith’s brain. He pulled through a gap in traffic and onto the highway’s right shoulder, rolling to a stop. On his left, cars continued to whiz past at 80 miles-per-hour, but the inside of the minivan was strangely quiet. Keith lost contact with all five of his senses and thought he must have been dropped into a bad dream.
The next thing he felt was his wife’s hand on shoulder. She squeezed lovingly, knowing he was no good with emergencies and improvisation. Keith looked down at his hands and then turned off the engine. Without saying a word, he popped open the driver’s door and leaned out to look at the tire. The rim sat on the pavement surrounded by flattened rubber.
Keith closed his door. With fully functioning capacities he may have said something clever like, “This puts a hole in our plans,” but he simply sat silently in adrenaline shock.
“Can you change it?” Keith’s wife asked timidly.
“The tire?”
“Yes, the tire. There must be a spare. Then we could drive to a gas station.”
“Is that what I should do? Or should I call someone? Don’t you think I should call someone for help?”
“Maybe the rental car agency.”
Keith fumbled for his phone and searched for an accident assistance number for Enterprise Rental Cars. He dialed the number and a voice answered after only two rings.
“I’m on the side of the road. The tire’s flat. What should I do?”
“Are you safe?” asked a voice on the line.
“Yes, I’ve pulled off the highway. What do I do now?”
Keith felt some relief as he went through the motions of reading off his rental agreement number and listening to the voice tell him a tow truck would be on the way to retrieve the minivan. Keith responded to a text request that was supposed to help Roadside Assistance pinpoint his location.
“What about me and my family?” Keith asked.
“We can send an Uber to your location.”
“There are six of us and all our luggage.”
The voice on the line paused but did not respond to Keith’s concern about passengers. “We’ll call back with an update in a few minutes,” the voice said before hanging up.
Keith clung tightly to his phone, anticipating the callback. The minivan fell eerily silent again, except for the constant WHOOSH of speeding cars passing only feet away.
From the rear of the minivan, Keith’s ten-year-old son asked, “Is someone gonna come get us?”
“Yes. We just have to wait.”
After two more minutes, Keith’s young passengers began to fidget in their seats.
“Can we take off our seatbelts?” the eight-year-old asked.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Can we go look around outside?” the ten-year-old asked.
“No. It’s dangerous. We’ll stay here and be quiet.”
Keith’s wife distracted the children by challenging them to count the number of cars that passed. As the numbers climbed higher, Keith wondered why he had not heard back from Roadside Assistance. He dialed the number again.
Enough of Keith’s brainpower had returned for him to recognize he was connecting with a call center, most likely in a foreign country. The person who answered asked the same questions as the person Keith had spoken with earlier. He patiently re-explained his situation and asked about the tow truck.
“Can you describe where you are?”
“I’m on Interstate 15, heading south.”
“Is that a highway?”
“Yes, it’s a highway. A big freeway. I’m about five miles from Primm, Nevada.”
“Okay, we’re trying to find a service provider.”
“You mean a tow truck isn’t on the way yet?”
The line disconnected.
The passengers in back stayed quiet for a few more minutes before growing restless. They tired of the car-counting game and pestered each other for entertainment. The four-year-old wailed. Keith had to get away. He opened his door again and slipped around the front of the minivan and out into the desert. He kicked at sand mounds and a pile of dried asphalt. The fresh air smelled good. Some of his calculating power returned and he figured it would take an hour and a half to walk to the nearest buildings on the horizon.
The minivan’s right-side door slid open and Keith’s ten-year-old son hopped out and ran toward him. Keith watched his skinny arms and legs flail as he moved.
“I told you to stay in the van,” Keith said, without sounding like he wanted his son to return.
“Mom said I should follow you.”
Together they inspected a culvert which was invisible from the road and ran under the entire freeway. It was big enough for an adult to crawl through. Keith made another call to Roadside Assistance and spent another frustrating conversation attempting to clarify his position and situation.
“We have six passengers. We need a ride for six people.” The operator had no update on when a tow truck might arrive.
Back in the car, Keith worried with his wife about what might happen if the tow truck showed up at a different time than an Uber driver. “Does the tow truck take the van and leave us here? Does the Uber take us and we leave the van?”
“What do the Roadside Assistance people say about it?” Keith’s wife asked.
“They have no idea what’s going on. Every time I call, I talk to a different person. If only they were here and we could talk face-to-face, maybe they would understand.”
Twenty minutes later, Keith got a call from an unknown California number. “This is Ida, your Uber driver. I’m driving around in the desert, but I can’t find you.”
“We’re right here on the freeway,” Keith insisted.
“Which freeway?”
“I-15. Twenty miles south of Las Vegas.”
Ida paused. “That’s three hours away from me. They must have sent the wrong GPS coordinates. I’m canceling the pickup.”
Keith talked with more people at Roadside Assistance attempting to explain the Uber mix-up. The call center employees kept to their script and could not understand the problem.
“I need to go pee,” the four-year-old said from the backseat.
Keith looked at his wife. There was nowhere to hide near the road. The desert sage bushes were too low to provide any bathroom cover. Then Keith remembered the culvert. He led the ten-year-old and four-year-old to a hollow depression invisible from the road. As he watched the younger son relieve himself, he worried about what would happen when one of the girls needed to go.
Keith watched hopelessly from the driver’s seat as cars and semi-trucks flew past the minivan, some of them swerving too close to the shoulder. How long would they be out there? Should he contact Uber directly for a ride? Should he call the police? And then suddenly he saw flashing orange lights coming toward him. A tow truck! Rescue! The gigantic black pickup truck with a four-door cab glistened like it had been sent directly from heaven. Keith jumped out onto the pavement, never so excited to greet a moving vehicle.
The tow truck driver stopped behind the minivan and took his time before emerging from the cab. He looked tired as he walked slowly toward Keith and stuck out his hand. “I’m Michael.”
“Am I glad to see you!” Keith shouted.
“Bad tire, huh?”
“Front left.”
“I’ll have to hook you up and take you in.”
Keith’s wife and kids opened the doors on the right side of the minivan. Michael got his first look at the passengers.
“Six of you? I was told an Uber was picking you up.”
Keith quickly explained the situation and Michael grumbled about how this kind of thing always happened with call center assistance. “I can’t leave you on the side of the road, although the folks you’ve been talking to probably wouldn’t care.”
“We’ve already been here two-and-a-half hours. I’m not sure what to do next,” Keith said.
Michael took another look at the kids in the minivan. “It breaks my heart seeing you like this. I’m not supposed to do this, but if you’re okay squeezing five of you in the backseat of my truck, I’ll drive you to the garage.”
“We can squeeze,” Keith assured him.
Michael scooped up the front end of the minivan with his tow hitch and then Keith’s wife and children jammed into the back of the truck, some facing forward and others backward. Keith hopped into the front passenger seat next to Michael. His gratitude and relief got in the way of his normal mental calculations and he chattered nervously about things he saw out the window. He repeatedly thanked Michael and asked him about the truck.
Michael was quiet at first, but he opened up during the twenty-five-minute drive to the repair garage. He shared a little about his life and how he had cared for his ailing mother until she passed away two weeks earlier. He had not been able to pay his bills and was afraid he might lose his truck.
“I’m back to work now,” Michael insisted. “I’m making money, but it might be too late. I wish I could talk to somebody face-to-face and explain the situation.”
Keith’s brain was focused on making it to the garage. He automatically said to Michael, “Well, I think you’re doing a great job.”
The tow truck reached a Firestone repair shop and Keith’s family poured out. Michael unhooked the minivan and then stared at Keith. “What will you do now?”
“I guess I’ll hire a ride to the rental car place at the airport and hope they give me another minivan. I’ll leave my wife and kids here.”
Michael frowned. “I hate to see them waiting any longer than necessary. Hop back in the truck. The airport’s kind of on my way.”
Keith returned to his seat in the truck next to Michael. On their way, Michael talked about all the towing jobs he hoped to get over the New Year’s holiday. Keith nodded and repeated how thankful he was. They reached the airport and Michael waved goodbye as Keith got out to find the Enterprise rental counter. Thirty minutes later, he was in a replacement minivan after complaining to the counter employees about the Roadside Assistance confusion.
Keith immediately drove to the Firestone garage and retrieved his family and luggage. After four-and-a-half hours, they were back on the freeway headed south. As they closed in on Mile Marker 7 where they had been stranded, Keith’s mind finally reset. A vision popped into his head of the towing company name written on the door of Michael’s truck. The name was familiar. Then he remembered. He immediately pulled over to the side of the road, one hundred yards from where they had stopped earlier.
“What’s wrong now?” Keith’s wife cried.
“Nothing. I just have to make a call before we go any farther.” Keith dialed a work number and one of his colleagues answered the phone.
“I need you to do something for me. Can you go into the last cases I reviewed and change my decision on the towing company?”
“You sure? What changed your mind?”
“You could say I met an angel face-to-face.” Then Keith added with a touch of his usual wordplay, “From now on, I’m sure this company will show up with payments in tow. They’ll haul themselves right out of debt.”
Please remember to subscribe for weekly reminders about new stories. You can subscribe by clicking here: Subscribe. You can also follow new content on any Podcast platform or on YouTube. For the full list of stories, return Home.