Very Bottom Dollar

I burned rubber, accelerating my fat family sized fuel-guzzling Chrysler away from a wasted half day of frustration. How did an eco-freak end up in this petrothirsting horror and with this much stress? Read on for a sorry tale with a moral at the end, or skip to the next blog post if you have enough frustration in your own life already.

I'm hiring a car for three weeks ... I searched around on the Internet a month ago and thought that I'd found a really good deal. Okay, I'm not going to wait to the end to give the moral, here it is: read the fine print. And here's another while I'm at it: the cheapest deal is not the best deal. Not fresh wisdom, but learned the hard way.

I'd already put off my departure by a day because of preparation, so I arrived early today to pick up the car. Dollar Car Rental had one lone worker who smiled a lot and was very chatty, in a poky office in a hotel which was being rebuilt in San Francisco's tacky tourist heartland, so there was plenty of time in the long queue to go through hammer!hammer!drill!scrape!caterpillar!hammer!hammer!
until my big moment arrived at the top of the queue and I found out they didn't have the compact car I'd ordered but could give me a giant family van, and all this without any insurance - nothing at all, not even 3rd party. How can this me legal? In any case, I'd have to buy insurance for a hefty fee on top, including the 5 days that the car would be parked at Burning Man.

Balk!

I walked out and tried to get another deal on a crummy Internet station which half worked, but it was too late. Everything was gone or more expensive. I went back. I stood in another long queue which had formed since I left. The one attendant smiled and chatted a lot with the other customers. Outside it went
hammer!hammer!drill!scrape!caterpillar!hammer!hammer!
and then I paid (through my teeth) and went outside, to discover how huge the car actually was (it seats 7 people) and that the smiling attendant had forgotten to give me a parking ticket, which the park captain insisted I needed to get out. And there was nothing more that I wanted right at that moment than to get out.

So my lesson: avoid Dollar at all costs in the future, and don't just think about Dollar. Take it from me.