It figures...

Friday when I was driving home from work, I noticed that my car turned over the 36,000 mile mark. I have a 3 year or 36,000 mile warranty on my car. So it has officially expired. I guess it kind of bothered me a bit to be without a warranty, but at the same time I know that the Mazda 3 is a good car and shouldn't have any reliability problems. I even made a joke about the warranty being out on my car at lunch this weekend. Well guess what happened yesterday morning. Thats right I started my car and there it was the check engine light. Great! I stopped the car and got out the manual to make sure that it really was the check engine light. What a cruel joke I thought. Well I of course panicked. I have a 28 mile drive to work and needed to be there in time to have a conference call with the court on one of my cases. I called Eli and he said it was probably just a sensor of some type and that it may be something that needed to get fixed, but it was unlikely that I wouldn't make it to work. So I drove to work totally on edge. I kept imagining myself stuck on the side of the road in rush hour traffic. I made it to work just fine no incidents. So I called the dealer where I bought my car and explained that my car had just ran out of warranty and here was the check engine light. He very politely told me to bring in the car and for $119.98 they could diagnose the problem. Yeah right! I then called a chain of repair shops. They said it was likely just some sort of computer problem if I was able to drive the car all the way to work with no problems. They said to bring it on by in the afternoon and they would hook it up to the computer and clear the error. Well I did that and it turned out that the computer code was one that is usually associated with air in the fuel tank. So they cleared the error and told me if it comes back on again that I should take the car to the dealer because there is an engine problem that should be covered by my powertrain warranty. So far the light has not come back on yet. Cross your fingers!