Dearest Altima friends and compatriots,
A 10-foot fiber-optic camera and a little spare time helped me discover the truth. You know of what I speak! (Er, type.)
The Seahawks were killing my Cowboys yesterday, so I said, "Screw this," hoisted my ass off the Barcalounger and lumbered into the garage. There, I unwound said seldom-used camera (I bought it off a proctologist who said he was getting out of the colonoscopy business) and rammed it up the passenger-side muffler of my 3.5. The intake barked a muted scream. Realizing my insensitivity, I gently withdrew the line and rubbed it down with Mobil 1 before reinserting it more gently.
About four feet in, I noticed a substantial blockage. It was sort of a mottled yellow-brown color as best I could tell; the camera didn't have a particularly fine resolution. But it was definitely solid and took up a good portion of the pipe just aft of the cat. "Aha!" I said, then promptly fell asleep from boredom.
When I awoke, I soldered a hook on the end of my fish tape and yanked the blockage out. "My God!" I yelled. "A potato! In my pipe!" I was astonished. Dumbfounded. Incensed. Rattled, much like a cheap Altima parcel shelf. So naturally, I fell asleep again.
Later in the day, after I'd recovered substantially, I took a closer look at my window sticker. "Surely," I thought to myself, "Nissan didn't include the potato option on this car." But as I scanned the fine, garbled, lawyered-up print of the option packages, my heart sank when I saw the truth:
1C, Potato Pack, $599
The print is very small and the typeface is very light, but it's there, my friends. And just like the microfilter option, which we all know isn't really an option at all, the Potato Pack is in fact for all purposes a factory-mandated purchase. And there's no doubt in my mind that potato robbed my 3.5 of 15 horsepower. No question at all. In fact, I'm 102-1/2 percent sure.
So rejoice, fellow Altima enthusiasts, and know that a little minor surgery will have your Altimas raging with the full 255 horses the Maxima crowd rubs in our faces. I've already phoned Ghosn and demanded a refund. His English was very poor and my French is even worse, but I got the gist that he told me to eff off. He did, however, offer to FedEx me some butter, sour cream and bacon bits if I kept quiet about the thing.
Fat chance of that.
Jarrod K. Wright
'02 3.5SE 5-speed
'98 SE 5-speed
A 10-foot fiber-optic camera and a little spare time helped me discover the truth. You know of what I speak! (Er, type.)
The Seahawks were killing my Cowboys yesterday, so I said, "Screw this," hoisted my ass off the Barcalounger and lumbered into the garage. There, I unwound said seldom-used camera (I bought it off a proctologist who said he was getting out of the colonoscopy business) and rammed it up the passenger-side muffler of my 3.5. The intake barked a muted scream. Realizing my insensitivity, I gently withdrew the line and rubbed it down with Mobil 1 before reinserting it more gently.
About four feet in, I noticed a substantial blockage. It was sort of a mottled yellow-brown color as best I could tell; the camera didn't have a particularly fine resolution. But it was definitely solid and took up a good portion of the pipe just aft of the cat. "Aha!" I said, then promptly fell asleep from boredom.
When I awoke, I soldered a hook on the end of my fish tape and yanked the blockage out. "My God!" I yelled. "A potato! In my pipe!" I was astonished. Dumbfounded. Incensed. Rattled, much like a cheap Altima parcel shelf. So naturally, I fell asleep again.
Later in the day, after I'd recovered substantially, I took a closer look at my window sticker. "Surely," I thought to myself, "Nissan didn't include the potato option on this car." But as I scanned the fine, garbled, lawyered-up print of the option packages, my heart sank when I saw the truth:
1C, Potato Pack, $599
The print is very small and the typeface is very light, but it's there, my friends. And just like the microfilter option, which we all know isn't really an option at all, the Potato Pack is in fact for all purposes a factory-mandated purchase. And there's no doubt in my mind that potato robbed my 3.5 of 15 horsepower. No question at all. In fact, I'm 102-1/2 percent sure.
So rejoice, fellow Altima enthusiasts, and know that a little minor surgery will have your Altimas raging with the full 255 horses the Maxima crowd rubs in our faces. I've already phoned Ghosn and demanded a refund. His English was very poor and my French is even worse, but I got the gist that he told me to eff off. He did, however, offer to FedEx me some butter, sour cream and bacon bits if I kept quiet about the thing.
Fat chance of that.
Jarrod K. Wright
'02 3.5SE 5-speed
'98 SE 5-speed
