Day 3

1. I'm grateful for rainy days that make the sky such an awesome color and clean up the air.
2. I'm grateful to be working at a place where I might be able to learn some really cool things.
3. I'm grateful that I was able to go and test drive a Mini.

On Saturday, I decided to get a few things done, and since I've wanted to test drive a Mini for a while to confirm if I wanted to buy one, I went to do that on Saturday.  When I walked into the Mini dealership, there was a salesperson right at the front of the store who asked me what I was looking for.  I told him I wanted a test drive, and he said sure.  He had to get some information from me, which he put in his computer, I'm sure to contact me later about the Mini to see if he could pursue a sale, but he was friendly and nice and didn't push me about anything.  He talked to me about the Mini that he owns and he answered my questions about stuff on the website that I was curious about.  He explained that the version of the JCW (John Cooper Works) Mini that he bought has a supercharger instead of the turbocharger that the JCW now has, and I got to ask him about the sport suspension versus the JCW sport suspension.

After that, he grabbed the keys to the Mini and a license plate.  I don't remember what color the car was, but I remember I was really confused by the key, because it doesn't have the traditional metal key portion. It's a key that's mostly just a circle of plastic that you put into a circular opening in the dashboard.  When you want to start the car, you press the start button while holding down the brake.  When I first started driving the car, I kept hitting the brakes too hard because I'm used to the brakes in Dan's truck, which you have to press pretty hard to get a large heavy truck to stop.  The Mini's brakes are pretty sensitive, and it's a small car, so I was making some very jarring stops.  The salesperson then took me through some of the roads in Salt Lake and turned on the sport mode for the car and let me play with the acceleration in the car.  He got me on the freeway and even reminded me to punch it when we were on the on-ramp.  He helped me use the windshield wipers since it was raining and I wasn't familiar enough with the car to do it myself.

I really liked the mood lighting button that he showed me in the car.  You could change the wall lights, as well as the lights in the door handles and a couple of other places to a different color.  I also really liked the blinker settings.  You could set the blinkers to turn on until you completed a turn, or you could set them to blink three times and then turn off.  I really liked how well the acceleration was able to push the car from a stop and how small the car felt.

When we got the car back to the dealership, I was really happy to note that the salesperson wasn't pushy at all.  He just checked to make sure I had all the information that I wanted and needed and sent me on my way.