I was leaving work and getting into my car, when I noticed one of my tires had a nail embedded in it — the flat head of the nail was flush with the rubber on the tire. Figuring it had been there for at least the whole day and noticing that my air pressure was fine, I figured I could get home and take the car to my local garage the next morning.

I showed up shortly after the garage opened at 8 a.m., expecting the job would take 20 minutes and I’d be out of there. I’m a regular customer, after all. They’ve fixed my tires before while I’ve waited. Sometimes, they haven’t even charged me.

“Two o’clock,” the guy behind the counter barked at me.

“I need to get to work,” I pleaded, taken aback. “I need it done now.”

“Two o’clock. Noon would be the soonest,” he said. “I only got one guy on today.”

Welcome to the Alberta boom.

Everyone who lives in this province has a story like this, just as everyone has a story about sitting in a restaurant for an hour during the lunch rush waiting for the establishment’s only waitress — who was on her first shift — to take the order.

As a newspaper editor at the Edmonton Sun who handles letters to the editor as part of my daily duties, I read these stories about the downside of the Alberta boom in the mail routinely: customer service has gone to hell; there are no good-paying jobs, just minimum-wage jobs; housing is too expensive; the roads are too congested because of the influx of newcomers from other provinces; the government isn’t spending enough on infrastructure; the government had no plan for dealing with the boom; the boom is out of control; etc.

To be sure, Alberta’s oil-slicked boom hasn’t led to Utopia. Housing prices have gone through the roof, meaning young families are looking at enormous, soul-crushing mortgages if they want to get into the housing market. Far too many of the available jobs are of the minimum-wage variety. (Yet there are employers who are advertising well-paid professional jobs and complaining they can’t fill those, either. So, go figure!)

But Albertans have to be careful that — in addition to many other Canadians stereotyping us as arrogant rednecks swimming in petrodollars — we don’t get labelled as Canada’s whiners, too. For starters, we’re unlikely to win any sympathy from the rest of Canada.

Spend any time in Alberta listening to Albertans and you might start to assume there are no benefits to living in the wealthiest jurisdiction in North America — that the “Alberta advantage” is just a myth and that Albertans won’t truly be happy until Ottawa imposes a carbon tax on the oilpatch, killing the boom dead.

This complaining about prosperity is even more amazing, considering that the letters N-E-P (for Pierre Trudeau’s much-despised National Energy Program) are only uttered in these parts if they’re followed by a contemptuous spit on the ground and a cursing of the federal Liberals.

Albertans remember — or should remember — what life was like when the boom ended and prosperity disappeared.

We’ve gone from counting our blessings to being contemptuous of them.

And I guarantee that Albertans who are unhappy about the downside of the boom won’t be any happier trying to find the upside of a bust. IE