Yes, I Want Tires With That

The 8-page synopsis and entry into the writing contest has gone right out the window. Sanity is in high demand and short supply these days, and the minimum amount required to write the synopsis far exceeds my stock. Then we can start talking about the cash required to enter the contest and go to the conference where the results are revealed, and we'll see an even greater supply-demand imbalance. So the synopsis has been ditched. How does this relate to tires? An excellent question.

See, I was still toying with the idea of writing the synopsis yesterday when I brought the car over to Firestone so one of our tires could get checked for a leak (some of the roads we traversed at Great Sand Dunes were a little mean to our poor car). Silly me, I thought this would be a lunch-time endeavor, leaving me the entire afternoon to write. They gave me an estimate of an hour, so I went wandering in the nearby Wal-Mart and mall. Then I came back and waited patiently for another fifteen minutes until the hour was up before I asked for my car.

Now, when they had asked me for my information, I had given them my home phone number. Had I known that they wanted to be able to call me while I was waiting for the car, I would've given them my cell number. Had I also known that they had tried to get in touch with me, I certainly wouldn't have sat around for fifteen minutes in the friggin' place, reading an old and insipid issue of Entertainment Weekly. But wasting time seemed to be the theme of the day, so I guess it all works out. Anyway, upon my request for my car, I found out that they couldn't patch a hole in the tire because the tires were bald and it was illegal for them to do anything other than replace the tires. I was a bit shocked to hear this as Mark had told me that the tires had another year to go before they needed to be replaced. Feeling very much like I was getting scammed, I called Mark and had to play Info Relay between him and the salesperson.

It turns out that tires can look just fine on their outer edge but be bald on their inner edge when the alignment is shot to hell, thus fooling someone who's looking at the tires from any other angle but underneath the car. Our car now has four brand-new tires on it, our credit card is wincing (though not nearly as much as Jerry's - see the May 15th entry), and I'm now entirely convinced that the synopsis idea is even worse than I thought if it's jinxed like that. I mean, if I tried to write the thing again, we may have to replace an engine or something.