I had to get new tires the other day. I know that I desperately needed them. Large amounts of tread had worn away to be as smooth as my bald skull. Tires seem like such a rip off to me. They are like jeans. The real crappy ones don’t feel right and are susceptible to a premature blowout (knees on the jeans, sides on the tire) but once you get to a basic quality level they all seem the same. It’s just the different brand name slapped on them that causes the radical difference in price. Yes I understand that one hugs the road slightly better and one hugs your ass slightly better but I think most folks get the really expensive ones just for the brand.
New tires suck because after you drive around for a week you forget about how much better the car is driving. They look all dirty and you cannot even tell that you just dropped a grand. I think that is why they put those little nubs all over the tire. That way it is a little more obvious that you have new ones. That must be the reason because certainly with all the modern science and technology in the world today someone could figure out how to de-nub a new tire before it gets to the showroom.
I could sure think of more enjoyable things to do with all the money I spent on a few hunks of rubber. A new bedroom TV, a dining room table that matched the rest of the house, a weekend in Mexico, most of a mortgage payment… No, instead I have tires. Rah rah rah… lets here it for safety.
Every time I shell out a bucket full of money for tires I always say to myself that this set I will try to take better care of. Then a few months down the road when its time to get them rotated, I come up with some flimsy excuse for not wanting to sit around bored out of my mind, sipping stale coffee, reading a Newsweek from 2006 for an hour while some scary looking bottom of the totem poll new employee kid that looks like last week he was pulling the wings off of flys behind the Junior High plays musical chairs with my tires until he strips one of my locking lug nuts and they find a reason to charge me $75 bucks for what was supposed to be free maintenance.
I have owned a bunch of different cars over the years and it seems to me the more expensive the car you have the more expensive the tires you have to get for it. Also, it seems like the more expensive the car the faster you go through the more expensive tires. Maybe its just the more expensive the car I have the crazier I can drive in it so I just burn through the tires faster because of my actions.
When I first got my driver’s license, I would borrow my Mother’s car whenever I wanted to go somewhere. Around the same time my Dad purchased a new set of tires for the auto but it seemed every couple of weeks I had another flat. He kept yelling at me for driving crazy or taking it to construction sites (which I was doing because it was a great place to make out with my girlfriend but of course I never admitted it). After three flats he complained to the tire place and it turned out there was a manufacturer defect on them. He got a new set and they all had a big laugh about it but I was the one on the receiving end of a shitload of abuse until they figured it out. Since then, I think, I have always had a grudge against the damn things.
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