First of all, here's Yet Another THANK YOU to Pedro and Stefan for creating Porsche Pedro's Boxster Board (even if you can't call it that...) I feel like a long, dark night of the soul is over now that we're back.
So, about a week after PPBB went away, I was dropping my daughter off at the airport at some ungodly early hour of the morning and wasn't thinking completely straight...I let myself get into a situation where I allowed an SUV slightly in front of me and in the left (of two) lanes to veer over too close to me (in the right lane) and I ended up kissing the curb, hard, with both right wheels. The next day my right-rear went flat as I drove over an exposed manhole cover in one of those ubiquitous road resurfacing areas. I limped the few miles home on the flat, and then had the Box flatbedded to my dealer the next day.
I'd already had one bit of good news: they could repair my wheels for around $120 a pop. As I already had a bunch of other scrapes and boo-boos on my right rims (I can be spacially challenged sometimes), I consider this a bargain. They came out good as new, by the way.
I didn't expect anything especially interesting to come out of the rubber situation, though. I had 16K miles on the original PS2s that came on my '09S; they had another few K left and that was going to be it. But here's what transpired: apparently, Michelin has now revised the designation on new PS2s from N-1 to N-2, and either Porsche no longer permits the N-1's to be installed by the dealer (especially if it would result in mismatched tires), or the dealer cannot even obtain any. So this was beginning to sound like bad news, that I'd have to immediately buy four new tires instead of just two. HOWEVER, before I even needed to think about that, the dealer explained that he managed to get Porsche to spring for two new tires for me (the left side) if I bought the two for the right. So I now have four new PS2 N-2's for the price of two. As I would have been replacing all 4 at full price pretty soon regardless, I consider this to have worked out pretty well.
I'm thinking that perhaps the way Porsche dealt with the tire designation issue in my case might be a good data point for anyone else with the N-1 tires who finds themselves in any similar sort of situation...