Getting to know you...

I got the car without incident yesterday, and discovered a horrible grating sound in the left rear tire today.

After stressing about it for a little while, I remembered that one of the ways they brought the price of the car down was to replace the luxury hubcaps (about which I could care less) with standard ones, and that was done immediately before they turned it over to me.

When I drove it home (and to the store) last night, it was pitch dark and pouring rain, and I was concentrating hard on muscling around the corners without power steering and on making sure the alarm system didn´t take me for a hijacker and shut the car off in the middle of the road, so I didn´t notice the sound.

Today it was very noticeable, but not until late afternoon, when pretty much any place that might look at it for me was closing down for the rest of the weekend.

So oh well. It´s clearly from the change they made yesterday, and I just hope it´s merely embarrassingly noisy and not also doing any damage because I won´t be able to get anyone to look at it on Sunday, I´m sure. And Monday I´ll be driving it to work.

Anyway. I´ve made friends with the alarm now, at least as far as I need to in order to stop and start the car without (usually) setting it off repeatedly. Well, maybe once or twice. Opening the back while the car was stopped was another story, but I´m sure we´ll all get along just fine after a few more days.