Tired of Tires

The Justy needs at least 2 new tires.

Harvey (Bruce's car) could do with some new ones too.

But at the moment, the Justy is in more dire straights.

So today, Bruce decided he was going to go suss out some new (used) tires for the guy.  He left the apartment around 8:30, but was back almost immediately.  Harvey had a flat tire.  Ironic, no?

He spent the next hour or so trying to convince the tire it really did want to be removed and replaced by a spare we have, ultimately, Bruce won, though it was a tough battle.

And off he went in search of the new (used) tires.

I got a call a little while later from him saying that he couldn't find the same size tire we had, but that the gal at the store said these other tires should work fine, but they were snow tires (2 of them studded), and we'd have to buy all 4, not just the 2 we needed.

Well, since the car really does need tires, we bought all 4.

On my lunch break from work, we too the Justy over to the tire center at Walmart for them to put the new tires on, however they informed us that because 2 of them were studded, they could only put the front ones on, which were the tires we needed replaced anyway..so whatever.

We went home, expecting it all to be done a few hours later.

Well, about an hour later, we got a call from Walmart saying they couldn't put the tires on because they were the wrong size.  And that they actually couldn't only put 2 of the 4 tires on because the tires all had to be the same size, and the tires we had on already were a different size than the ones we just bought.

Good grief.

We called another mechanic to verify the information, and received the same diagnosis.

We decided to take the tires back to where we got them, because not only had they been wrong about the tires being able to work, they had actually misled us with the size of the tires themselves.

Talk about frustrating.

I spoke with my supervisor at work, and he allowed me to leave work early so we could deal with the problem together.

We went back to the tire place (where they don't give refunds), and informed them of their sizing error, what we had been told by 2 different mechanics, and asked for...yep, a refund.  At this, the gal called the mechanic she had previously called (who told her the size would work), and was told yet again that it would work.

So we decided to go talk to the guy in person.

We explained the situation again, that 2 other mechanics said it couldn't work, and that we were becoming frustrated with the run-around.  We were reassured that the tires would work, that they could even put on the studded tires, and things would be peachy.

So we drove back to Walmart to pick up the Justy from where we had left it, returned to the mechanic, and dropped it off with the new tires.

An hour or so later, we got a call from this mechanic, explaining that the tires would not work because of the size (sound familiar??).

We were both beyond frustrated, tired, and cranky (well, I was cranky at least).  The guy however, was very helpful and explained the issue (it involved the factory specifications for the tires versus what we had on...I'll spare you the details), he even called the tire gal and she agreed to give us a refund.  On top of that, he didn't charge us for the labor used to put the tires on and off again.

So we drove back to the tire place, got our refund, and came home...with the car in much the same condition as before...after dealing with it all for about 8 hours for Bruce, and 5 hours for me.

The joys of older cars.

Older, smaller cars.

Yeah...

Cars.