August 11, 2004--Rental Cars & Salty Marie

Packing and renting. Renting and packing. Somehow this has taken all day. I thought I had figured out my costumes and packed yesterday but it still took me four hours tonight and I've brought enough to costume the entire cast of "Grumpier old men IV go to Hawaii." Only in this case I'm the only grumpy old man, and I'm not really all that old, though I am grumpy.

I rented the car online last week through the auto club. I checked all around--spent days comparing rates and all that. I always do this, then I rent something and wonder if I could or should have gotten something better. I did finally stop obsessing about it when I realized it didn't matter, they were mostly the same, so I got the same price but from Hertz, which should mean fewer problems.

I've had more rental cars nightmares than I care to mention because it just makes me look stupid, but maybe it's not me, maybe it's them. I like to tell myself that about a lot of things.

But here's why I think it probably is them. One time lawyers for a rental car company came to me to be an expert witness in a court trial. They wanted me to claim that their rental agreement clearly stated all the pertinent facts. But their rental agreement was not only set in tiny type, it was set in type, narrow, slanted type. If they'd asked me, "How can we set this to make it so hard to read that nobody will read it," I would say, "Set it in tiny, narrow, slanted type."

Now they wanted me to say that their impossible-to-read-typesetting was really easy-to-read, and, being too stupid to accept a large sum of money for something I don't believe, I refused. I told them I'd be happy to tell them how to actually make it easy to read, and surprise, surprise, they were not interested.

My first rental car nightmare was renting a car that had a crack on windshield that I didn't notice until I'd driven off the lot. I drove a block, turned around and brought it back. When I pointed out the crack, the rental agent accused me of having done it in my two minutes on the mean streets near LAX.

My most memorable rental car (and I don't mean that in a good way) came complete with a mini-spare installed on the rear passenger side. I didn't notice the temporary spare you're only supposed to drive less than 50 miles at less than 50 miles per hour. So I drive drove 400 miles at 90 miles on it. Then I stopped for gas and finally saw it, thinking, "That doesn't look right." I made this discovering on a Friday at 5:30, in the middle of nowhere and when I called the rental car company... which group of idiots was that... I can't recall.

You'd have thought I'd learned, but no. On a recent 48-hour trip to LA, I spent four hours waiting for my rent car at Dollar. That's right, Dollar rent-a-car. The Rent-a-car company that sucks. Remember that.

First, while I kept seeing vans from Hertz and National taking people to the off-site rental places, it took 45 minutes to flag one down for Dollar. When I got there, I found a huge line, like I was trying to get on the Matterhorn at Disneyland. And the line wasn't moving. I asked people how long they had waited, and they said, "Two hours," and I thought, "That's not right."

Then I waited two hours. By which time I was on the phone trying to find another rental car, but they were all booked up. Apparently Dollar, that's right, Dollar, the company that sucks, had booked a lot of cars without bothering to have them there for people to actually rent.

After a few more hours during which time if I could have stolen a car I would have, I went up to the business desk and said, "I'm only in town for 48 hours. I've now wasted four here in line. I've missed one appointment and am late for another. So you have two choices. Choice #1 is that you can give me a car, right this very second. Choice #2 is that I can take this chair and throw it through that plate glass window," I said, while lifting and aiming a chrome chair.

I'm not making this up. The woman behind the counter handed me a set of keys, instantly. "Here you are, sir," she said, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. I asked her, "Why did you have a car for me instantly when I threatened to break a window, but people who got here before me are still waiting?" She just smiled and I stopped asking questions and unobtrusively drifted out to my car in such a way as to be invisible to the angry horde still in line. And did I mention that Dollar rent-a-car sucks? It can't be repeated too often.

But today's rental was pretty easy. It just meant driving 40 minutes to the rental place and finding that the car I'd requested wasn't there. Luckily, they did have a bigger, better car (a Ford Crown Victoria, an ugly car with a pretentious name but very big, comfortable leather seats) which they gave me for the same price, so I can't really complain. And Hertz's rental guy, Reggie, was so nice and patient at explaining what mysterious red lights on the dash meant that I also can't complain. It's hard to come up with comedy when people are nice and things are fine. Damn them!

OK, so we're On the road. I'm typing on my Handspring Treo (a little Palm computer with a keyboard) as my wife drives at 100 miles per hour. I personally do not drive 100 miles per hour because I'm afraid of being arrested and sent to jail because I'd end up somebody's bitch, so I set the cruise control to 65 and just cruise along like I'm 80 years old, the average age of people who drive the "Ford Crown Vic," (as my wife calls it, like she's been in the police force for years, since that's what they drive and what they call it, too).

This car is like driving a dark cave. Inside it's all dark gray, which is more accurately called "anthracite" and would be called that if the target buyers in Ohio could pronounce it. Instead, it's called "Dark Gray." Everything's dark, the dash, seats, carpet, even the headliner/ceiling. It makes everything outside seem unnaturally bright, like I'd just had my eyes dilated.

Driving in this car is like sitting in the dark looking out at the light--it makes the road look like a movie. That's not a bad thing, but it feels somehow unreal.

Now I feel like I've lost the hearing in my right ear. I'm hoping its just the crappy stereo. The sound system has an aquatic quality, as if the music is emanating from an aquarium. If I didn't know better I'd think the sound was specifically tuned for goldfish.

And driving through endless nothingness makes it even more like an Andy Warhol movie.

Now I'm driving (don't worry, I'm not typing while driving, I wrote this while sitting at Marie Callendar's, the place we mistakenly went for lunch). Back to the car--there are many buttons on steering wheel. They all look and feel the same--like a bad Sony remote control. I wanted to turn down the aqua stereo and we nearly froze to death. Why couldn't they have different textures so you could feel the difference? Instead, you have to look down and endanger your life to change the channel. It's no better than fiddling with knobs on the dash.

And I don't get the dash. Why is it so ugly? Why are most car dashboards so ugly. They're what you see all the time, so they should spend more time on them than, say, the taillights, which you rarely if ever see. But they don't.

I would think car companies would have to go out of their way to make them this ugly, with all these needless curves and lines and boxes and indents and who knows what that thing is called, it's like a dark gray goiter. Wouldn't simple and elegant be easier than complex and cheesy? I guess not. Or maybe, once again, this is what the target market likes.

I'm clearly not the target market

Not for this car. Not for Marie Callendar's. We used to go to Marie's when they first opened in San Diego. It was very exciting back then for some unknown reason. You had to wait a long time to get what was almost always a very salty dinner. But there were a lot fewer restaurants back then--really. When I was growing up there were something like two restaurants within 10 miles. Three if you counted the Taco Bell, which charged 17 cents for every item when it opened. Then there was the excitement of Kentucky Fried Chicken (now called "KFC" in order to sound more hip and eliminate the need to say three clearly tiring syllables.)

So we remembered Marie's fondly and thought we'd start our vacation with a bang of pie. We got there and were the only ones there, which we should have taken as a sign. It was 100 degrees outside and about 45 inside and the air conditioning was designed to blow directly on you, causing your muscles to seize up, presumably making it harder to taste the food.

Wear my jacket, eat my lunch... I went out to the car and got my jacket, an insane thing to do in 100 degree heat, but otherwise I risked frostbite. My wife immediately took my jacket. And ordered what I wanted to order.

The menu was about 17 pages long and consistent of a wide range of products that had been previously frozen and would shortly be fried.

I chose the chicken pot pie, because I love chicken pot pies and I used to have Marie's frozen ones and they weren't bad. I didn't realize that I'd be getting one of her frozen ones, but that's what I got. So it wasn't bad, but I don't like my entrees to have recently been defrosted. My wife ordered a chicken Caesar sandwich that also miraculously managed to taste defrosted.

From frostbite to defrosted. I sensed a theme.

Another theme at Maries was all around bad design. The menu itself was set in tiny type, rivaling the rental-car agreement for readability. Since the average age of their customers has to be 60 or older (much the average age of ford crown Victoria drivers--we were getting the whole senior experience that could only be complete if the 16 year old waitress offered us the senior discount), so it means most customers can't read read the menu without a guide dog, or at least very strong reading glasses. Why? Just make the type bigger. So the menu would go from 17 pages to 19 pages, no one would count.

After squinting to read a badly designed menu, we're eating the in the breeze of badly designed air-conditioning which seemed to be trying to re-freeze my only recently defrosted entree, and finding ourselves looking to the faces of the only other couple in the restaurant, because the ill-advised booth dividers were "designed" with an opening only an eye level. So instead of actually dividing, they just managed to make it impossible not to have eye contact with strangers. I guess the point was so you didn't have to see their mouths, because sometimes there are few things more nauseating than watching strangers eat, especially strangers with dentures. But I digress.

Then there was the music--weird 70's music once again so age-inappropriate and loud that the people at next table were complaining at almost the exact same time we were complaining. I've heard that bad "Muzak" is programmed to make people buy, so maybe this was programmed to bring the restaurant patrons together in anger, but that didn't really seem good for business. It was probably more to get people to leave, thereby increasing turnover.

To try to reward ourselves for getting through the meal despite howling winds and psyche-shattering Muzak, we decided to order pie. I ordered banana and my wife ordered coconut. They both tasted the same--very sweet. Other than that, if you'd blindfolded they wouldn't have been able to tell them apart--well, except maybe that there was something resembling banana in mine, and some sawdust shavings in my wife's.

So I spoke to the manager whose name was Charity. She was sitting in a booth next to the bathroom with her WiFi laptop and a cell phone headset (because they didn't give her an office), and I explained the problems of the frozen air and painful music and she said she take care of it immediately. Nothing changed. We left, happy to get back into the dark cave of the car where we could control the air conditioning and only occasionally froze when we tried to change channels on the radio.

I didn't realize my tastes were so off middle-American center. I know my politics are but I guess I've become a real San Francisco Bay Area Liberal Fresh-food Gay-loving stereotype. That's certainly better than the alternative.

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