Sometimes you have to learn things the hard way. Or, if you’re lucky, someone can teach it to you on TikTok like one woman who recently learned what rotating your tires actually means.
Musician Nia Kionna, who goes by Miss Carter (@miss_carter2) on TikTok, recently caught a flat tire and picked up a valuable lesson when she went to have it replaced. Hopefully, she will save others from a similarly embarrassing situation.
@miss_carter2 I swear i didnt know thats what rotating tires meant 😭 #fyp #cars #viral ♬ original sound – Miss Carter
She passed on the knowledge in a TikTok she posted to the social media app three days ago. The clip currently has over 1.2 million views.
She captioned the video with a confession: “I swear I [didn’t] know [that’s] what rotating tires meant.”
Rotating your car’s tires refers to moving the tires from one wheel to another. This can include rotating them from left to right, from back to front, or even diagonally. The reason for doing so is that tires tend to wear unevenly and rotating their position ensures a more even wear over the life of the tire.
But that’s not what Miss Carter thought.
“I thought that when you get your tires rotated they just spin them really, really fast,” she said.
This created a big misunderstanding when she took her car to get her flat fixed. Carter wanted to patch the tire but was told that the tread was dangerously low, and that she needed to replace the entire tire.
Carter thought she was being taken advantage of by the mechanic and told him she would buy the tire elsewhere. That’s when the confusion started.
“When I get my car back, the flat tire that was in the back left is now on the front right,” she told her viewers.
“So now I’m mad because I’m like, ‘Y’all popped one of my tires because I didn’t want to buy a tire from you.’” she said. “He was like ‘Maam, we rotated your tire.’”
“I’m like, ‘Okay, you rotated it,’” she went on, spinning her fingers to illustrate a tire “rotating.” “‘What’s that have to do with now I have a flat tire back here and I’ve got a flat tire up here, why is that the case?’”
“Your tire is not flat back there,” the mechanic informed her.
“So you fixed my tire and then you pooped that one?” she asked. “No, we rotated the tires,” he told her and she finally grasped what he meant.
“You take the tires off the car and rotate them around!” she told her viewers. “I felt so dumb.”
Carter’s embarrassing visit to the mechanic did have a positive outcome for her viewers, many of whom had misunderstood the term too.
“‘When you drive them they rotate’ my thoughts exactly. Learn something new every day,” one commented.
“I aint even gonna lie, I just learned what rotating tires mean from this. didn’t know what it mean before, didn’t care enough to google or ask,” another wrote.
“The way I found out what rotating tires meant because of this LMFAO,” a third viewer added.
“This is why we get taken advantage of when we go to car dealerships,” Carter tells her viewers at the end of the video. “We should learn about cars y’all. Ladies, we need to take a class or something.”
The Daily Dot reached out to Carter via TikTok for further comment.
