Here is a blog about another of my ‘it could only happen to me’ stories. You know how they go – the great floods of January debacle, 7 months to find an apartment dramas and who could forget Dry July? My most recent humorous anecdote begins on a wet and windy Friday night in Melbourne, smack bang in the middle of Spring.

I had plans to meet my editor and friend, Onya Magazines Sandi Sieger, at 6pm for a quick dinner before we headed to ACMI for a screening of Je t’aime… moi non plus, part of a series of films depicting the lives of Birkin and Gainsborough.

The weather worked against me and the 10 minutes it should have taken to get to Fed Square took closer to 40, making me inexcusably late. A quick dinner turned to an even quicker hot chocolate and we entered the cinema, expecting a fashion documentary of sorts.

How wrong we were. To use the words from the ACMI website (simply because I can’t find the words), the film was ‘sexually daring and taboo laden’. Not at all what we were expecting and rather disturbing. After 50 minutes, we walked out (and we were not the first!)

After such an unusual (and unexpected) evening, we headed to dinner, slightly shocked and seriously in need of a drink. Dinner conversation turned to marriage and boyfriends, where I spoke strongly of my fabulous independence and how I had no need (read: this does not mean I don’t want) for a man.

Heading back to the car, recovered from our earlier experience, I noticed something all single girls dread. A flat tyre. (Carrie could have made an entire episode about this.)

History will tell you that the only man a girl can depend on is her daddy (or possibly it was a cult feature film of the 80s), so this is who I called. My dad is a mechanic and I have never had the need for the RACV. Every time something has gone wrong car wise in the past, I lived 15 minutes from my parents. Now I am an hour away. What was a girl to do?

Dad advised (based on my description there was about 3 inches of air left in the bottom of the tyre) I could drive the 10 minutes home, but that would be it – I’d need to change it. Me? Um, not my area of expertise but I’d sort something out! So home I went, thinking of the irony of my previous conversation and how now I was in desperate need of a man.

I called a friends partner, and he didn’t know how to change a tyre either. I considered ignoring the problem and catching trams and cabs everywhere. I nearly asked random strangers on twitter to save me. But in the end (after spending the morning in cabs and 3 different trams) I drove the car to the service station and pumped up the deflated tyre all by myself. For the first time ever. Probably not the last.

This temporary measure got me the 60kms to my parents where my dad happily changed my tyre (it had a screw in it) and then proceeded to fix a half a dozen other things he ‘noticed’ needed looking at.

Those pink ladies were right. The only man a girl can depend on is her daddy. Thanks Dad.