Fear of a Rental Car

Okay, so my car got all smashed up.  Not my fault.  I know it, the police know it, and even the insurance companies know it.  Oblivious Driver Girl’s insurance company has accepted full liability, which means that I get a rental car until my car is either fixed or pronounced dead.  But the only thing scarier than insurance companies are rental car companies.

The first thing that the rental car person tried to do was sell me insurance.  Now, I must remind you that I picked this rental car up on Friday afternoon, a few hours before approximately 97″ of snow was dumped onto New England, and I was reminded of this fact repeatedly by the representative.  Not only that, but this particular place sells all of their cars after renting them, so they have very strict policies on damage.  Even if I have my own insurance, they told me, it will not cover all of their expenses.  For instance if I brought it back with a tiny ding or scratch on it anywhere, they would not only charge me for that repair, but the rental fees associated with every day it was not available to rent, due to the repair.  Plus there were extra fees, taxes, charges, tariffs, tribute to the emperor, and a variety of other payments that my personal insurance would never ever cover, due to the fact that they must be paid in wampum.

So now I am terrified.  They have done their job well.  I am about to drive out into a blizzard with a two-year-old that loves dinging and scratching expensive things, and my wampum account is dangerously low.  So what could I do?  I bought the insurance.  BUT!  They assured me that I could take the insurance off at any time.  Once the storm was over, for instance, I could come back and take it off, which I was very happy about.  So I bought it.  “Can I come back Saturday afternoon and remove the insurance?” I asked.

“Oh yes, or on Sunday,” she told me.  So I left, fully planning on coming back the next day to remove the insurance and spend the rest of my time with the car driving in fear.  Except when I returned on Saturday afternoon, I discovered that they are not open on the weekends.  Despite telling me to come back on Sunday, their hours clearly informed me in big writing on their door that Sunday’s hours were: CLOSED.  And Saturday they closed at noon.  I had been scammed.

It’s all a scam anyway, you know?  The insurance companies, the rental car people, all of it.  None of it really benefits the consumer.  If I had saved all the money I had paid out in insurance all of these years, I would have had more than enough to fix the car.  Obviously.  Except that’s illegal.  So I am required to pay insurance money, and when something happens I am able to get a rental car, for which I am required to pay more insurance money.

I don’t know what is going to happen, but I’m going to go over to the rental car place today to ask them not to charge me for the past two days, since they mislead me as to their hours.  But they might say no.  After all, their hours were clearly printed, no matter what they may have implied.  And if that’s the case, that’s fine.  I’ll ding and scratch the hell out of it myself, and they can suck it.  I’m not scared of them anymore.  I have the insurance.