I'm just curious to see how many Z's have been delivered in Mass thus far. I think I may have been one of the first to take delivery.

My dealer got delivery on Friday PM, called me Friday PM to ask when I wanted to pick up the car. Naturally I said right away.

Can you believe it? He had someone work overtime Friday night to prep my car, and I picked it up Saturday.

What is even more unbelieveable is that I ordered on 3-21-02, was 16th of 18 allocations to this dealer-and as luck would have it, my car was the 1st to be delivered to the dealer! Chrome Silver Touring AT.

As for the car. AT is awesome. The engine just wants to get up and go. Since I am trying my best to follow the owners manual, which says to keep it under 4000RPM for the first 1200 miles (A rep making the rounds in Mass told the dealer that owners could wind the cars out right away-I'm still going to follow the manual), I haven't seen the full potential yet. But I know it's going to be awesome. The exhaust has a nice growl to it; not loud-but just enough noise to let you (and others) know that you've got one hell of a car. Handling, I left the interstate on one of those hairpin turns at 65, and it was as if I were still going straight at 85.

As for quirks that others have written about. The antenna is fine; a short flexible black one-nothing to worry about-looks fine-you'll get used to it. The empty navigation box, so flimsy, there's a warning label on it to tell you how to close it (so it doesn't come off it's tracks!) again-don't have a heart attack-you'll get used to it. The gas cap-yeah it juts out a tinyyyyy bit-I'd have never noticed if I hadn't read about it. The Bose-yeah maybe not the greatest-but after I fooled around with the controls and cranked it up a bit while cruising at 85 mph (around 3000 rpm), the thrill of driving overcomes any concerns about the radio-again, take a chill/thrill pill-you'll get over it.

My beef is the storage compartments. Knowing that I get pulled over for speeding at least twice per year (get a ticket only 25% of the time, though), I know that I need to have that registration handy. Imagine having to contort yourself to get at your car papers in a storage compartment behind the seat ( or for that matter, getting anything-even something simple like a map, especially if someone is sitting in both seats-there really should have been some type of storage up front). What I figured I have to do is fold my registration in quarters and store it in the small console area between the seats. But as I have said before, I'll get over it.

Next beef is that the dealer drilled out the front air dam to put that license holder on. I went to remove it and found 2 drill holes there!-big ones-I had to put the holder back on because I couldn't drive around with 2 holes in the front (I got over it). Also, the scres they had for the license plate were TOO LONG. Had I not noticed, I would have screwed them into the paint on the front air dam and made a mess of that. BEWARE of the screws in the front license plate holder!

As for the curb appeal. I pulled into a shopping mall to find my wife and witnessed a near accident as a guy in a 300ZX spotted me and nearly hit another car in his effort to get to me before I even got out of the car. He came over while I'm turning off the car and I had to spend 5 minutes with him talking about the car.

Then, when I found my wife (she hadn't seen the car yet), I brought it to the front of the store to pick her up. Before she could even get into the car, I had 5 people around the car asking questions. A car went by and there was almost another accident as the driver just missed hitting another car because she was gawking at my car. After about 10 minutes of this, I told my wife that we needed to get out of there.

Be prepared to be someting like a celebrity for a while; wherever you go, you're going to get attention and have to decide whether to be polite and patient, or get the hell out of Dodge as fast as you can before you're noticed.