Crashed my brand new Creality Ender 3!

Hello, all! Longtime fan of the technology, degreed mechanical engineering technician, creator of several 3D printed roller coaster cars and a dune buggy steering wheel for my school's capstone...and just now getting my own personal printer. For Christmas this year I was given a Creality Ender 3 printer that I've been in the process of setting up between work and other obligations, and today I was ready to test print it! Got my filament in the mail, loaded it, told it to print the test dog it came with...and it ran the nozzle aground into the little plastic cover on my bed, leaving a nasty scratch in the plastic but not on the metal. So my questions regarding this little incident are...

A. How do I prevent this from happening again? I set it up largely using 3D Printing Canada's YouTube video on the printer and it went smoothly, but the only issue I could see was that when I sent my nozzle to the origin, it was dipped way below the level of the bed. I assumed this was normal since it kind of looked this way in their video but evidently, its not and I scratched my base. I lowered it with a level to keep it flat but I don't think it was enough to get it below the zero level that the control system is recognizing.

B. Do I go about replacing the gouged plastic cover and if so how? It's just a little piece of plastic held on with a few binder clips so I don't think it's that necessary, but there's warning info and such on it so I feel it might be needed. If it needs replaced where can I get another one?

Thanks in advance for the help guys! I have the basics of 3D printing mastered but I've not run into an issue on my own before so I thought I'd turn here. Probably a rookie question that's about to get laughed at but thanks in advance for the help!