I was just pulling off of the freeway, and probably ran over something on the exit, so it was good in a "non-dangerous" respect, but bad in a "a billion people driving by the entire time" respect. I pulled off the exit and went a quarter of a block to find some room to put the spare on. It's in the high 90's at the lowest, and I'm in my clothes for work. Luckily I had a t-shirt on underneath a polo shirt, or I would have sweated even more than I ended up sweating, which seems impossible.
I open up the trunk and get the spare out. Then I start searching around and can't find the jack. I call the previous owner, and he has no clue where it was or if it was even there to begin with. While I'm on the phone with him, I turn around and a highway patrolman is pulling up behind me. I hang up and the highway patrolman and some other guy he has in the car get out and bring a jack and a tire wrench over. We take the cover off of the rim, and realize immediately that Volkswagens use some crazy bolt that is too small for standard tire wrenches. We also realize that using the jack on my car would ruin the trim around the bottom. They come over to the trunk with me, and we spend 10 minutes searching for the jack and tool kit. We're all taking turns looking in the user manual and trying to figure out where it's supposed to be. We finally find the jack, but no tool kit. They finally realize that they can't help, so they end up leaving . I tear apart the trunk, and finally find the tool kit 20 or so minutes later jammed under part of the back seat.
I take the wrench over to the tire, and immediately realize that the tires were put on with a pneumatic gun, and it's going to be hell to get them off. over the course of everything I've described above, I was getting calls from one of my friends (I was supposed to be going to another friend's bachelor party), calls from the previous owner, and texts from another person. I'm attempting to call people back while I'm literally standing on top of the wrench with all of my weight trying to get the lugnuts off. It probably took me another 30 minutes or so to get them all off.
I then proceeded to spend about 15 minutes trying to figure out how in the hell the weird ass German jack worked, as it was different than any jack I'd ever seen before. I finally get it up and on, and realize the car didn't have the e-brake on, and it rolled off the jack (luckily the blow out was still on it, so it didn't come crashing down on me). I throw the e-brake on, come back over, and finally get the tire off and put the spare on. By the time I get everything done and drove away, all tire shops were closed. I didn't trust my own replacement abilities after that fiasco to drive 60 miles to my friend's bachelors party, so had to call and say sorry.
It was a huge comedy of errors upon errors. A simple tire replacement that would have taken me 30 mins max on any other car ended up being about 3 times that long. My back now feels like that of an old man's from the initial attempts at loosening the lug nuts, and my manhood has also received it's own humbling. I will not be asked by any German race car drivers to work in their pit crew any time soon.