Travel (Mis)adventures Pt. 1: The Great Rental Car Debacle

Right, so that was fun.

Yesterday we rented a car in Bath in order to drive around to various more remote locations: Stonehenge, Avebury, etc., ending in Salisbury, where we planned to drop off the car and then take a train back to London.

We successfully (more or less) navigated insanely narrow country village streets and an unholy number of roundabouts in this Nissan SUV which we were surprised to get considering I thought we were getting a compact car. We didn't get lost, thanks to Google Maps. We managed to visit most of the sites we wanted to see (with a few exceptions due to time constraints) and congratulated ourselves on getting to the car rental office in Salisbury 15 minutes before our scheduled dropoff time.

Of all the various things that could go awry with this plan, we never guessed it would be the part where we DROP OFF THE CAR.

But then, it all started just a little off. The night before picking up the car, we noticed that the reservation paperwork we'd printed said that we were picking it up at 5 pm in Bath and dropping it off at 6 pm in Salisbury. (It's entirely due to their crap website which likes to reset the time of your reservation any time you make any minor change while trying to set it up.) This was NOT what we had intended for our all-day trip, but I managed to change it online to an 8:30 am pickup. Okay. Not too bad. They had a car for us when we showed up the next morning, though it wasn't the one we expected. Fine.

BUT THEN!!! Upon arriving at the Salisbury rental office at 5:45, we found the facility gates locked with a giant padlock, the whole place apparently shut (despite their posted closing time of 6:00), and no key dropbox anywhere. We searched in vain for a way in, to no avail. We spent about 10 minutes wandering around in utter confusion, going WHAT IS HAPPENING THIS IS CRAZY AARRGGGHHH.

Then came the phone calls. I called their office number and nobody answered. I called the office where we rented the car in Bath and nobody answered. I called the Customer Service main number and got a recording that said their customer service line closed at 5:30.

We all know how much I love making phone calls, so of course I made yet another call in a last-ditch attempt to speak to a human, and called the next closest car rental office, 20 miles away at the Southampton airport. The very nice lovely woman I spoke to was calm with my flustered self, waited on the phone while we searched one more time for a dropbox or a way in, and finally suggested that we leave the car parked in front and HIDE THE KEYS SOMEWHERE. Oh god. There seemed to be nowhere good to hide the keys that we could actually reach from OUTSIDE.

Here's the really fun part: Rob finally decided to jump the fence. There was a high iron fence all the way around the place except on one short side where the car rental facility abutted the neighboring auto shop business. (BTW we did ask them what the heck was up with the Hertz people and they were like, uh, we don't know them.) On that side was a rickety wooden fence about 6 feet high. Braving CCTV cameras and who knew what other possible alarms and things, Rob climbed over, hid the keys underneath their rental office portable structure, and climbed back to our side. The kind Southampton office lady agreed to send them an email on our behalf so there was external evidence we attempted to make the dropoff. Rob took pictures to document where we left the car and keys, and later on, when we'd actually made it back to our lodgings in London at around 10:30 pm, I followed up by filling in the web contact form (since Hertz apparently doesn't have a direct way to email anyone), explaining what happened, and sending them a picture showing where we left the keys.

As positive as our experiences with Hertz have been the last few times we used them, including in Australia, this time was TOTALLY INSANE.

GOLD MEMBERSHIP MY ASS.

Holiday Chemistry

It always amazes me how much baking is about chemistry. (And yes, I'm just starting right in without any rationalization of my long absence, and no, there's not gonna be one, so there.) I set out to make my first lemon meringue pie today, which I'm going to serve tomorrow evening to Rob and our friend Fumi. I was daunted by the intimidatingly lengthy instructions in the Joy of Cooking, which included a lot of finicky specifications for timing, temperature, and the interactions of both. But I'm not a bad baker, on the whole, so I thought I'd try it, despite only having semi-success with meringue cookies in the past. Apparently I learned from my mistakes, since the photo above depicts my good(-looking, at least) pie. What remains to be seen is whether the bottom of the meringue is, as the cookbook put it, "slippery" or if it's nice and set. I have to say the lemon curd part tasted awesome. I'm not entirely sure about the crust, either, which I prepared using a different method ("pat in the pan") than I normally do. I just didn't feel motivated to slave over a bowl with the pastry cutter. We'll have to see how that went. I'm hoping good ingredients help--organic local eggs and Meyer lemons.

Even though we're not having our big dinner with all the trimmings until tomorrow--or the family dinner with my in-laws, which is Saturday--I still feel the holiday spirit. (How can I not, with that pie staring at me?) I called my mom. I called my dad. I even called my aunt & uncle, and had a chance to talk to my cousins (and put up--hopefully relatively gracefully--with my aunt pestering me about babies). This is a lot of phone calls for me. Making phone calls to multiple relatives always says "holidays." Also, I haven't done a lick of "real work" since midafternoon, which is pretty good for me these days. Instead, I started playing Twilight Princess on the Wii, made a pie, and continued labeling photos from our trip. It's going to take ages to actually sort everything and upload a good selection, but for now, you can check out Day One in Rome. If the chemistry continues to be right--and I'm adding a little red wine to the mix--tonight will hopefully be relaxing, tomorrow should be a tasty food extravaganza with a roast duck, and Saturday...well, there will be hyperactive nephews aged 2 and 4, but plenty of turkey and thankfulness, if I may indulge in a sappy moment for a moment.

Hangin' on the Telephone

I may have mentioned this before. I'm pretty sure I have, since I have an existing tag called "I Hate the Phone." But yeah, I hate the phone. Specifically, I really hate making phone calls. My feelings about making phone calls vary, but they range from mild annoyance to sheer terror.

I had one of the (thankfully rare) sheer terror moments today. I have to admit, I worked myself up into it over a period of a few days. Here's the story: I responded to a notice on my grad school's alumni e-mail list--a fellow alum was looking for an editor to tidy up a novel manuscript for a friend. She was moving out of the area, and he was looking for someone who could help with grammar, syntax, and formatting, since English is not his first language (he's Italian) and he's also elderly (in his 80s).

I thought it sounded like an interesting project--a semi-autobiographical WWII novel called I Due Villaggi that's already been published in Italian. I called the alumna and she was very nice and encouraged me to give him a call. She said the guy is very sweet but a bit hard of hearing and difficult to understand over the phone due to his accent, so he'd probably want to meet in person to talk about it. He lives in Oakland. Fine. Whatever. I can go to Oakland.

But then the anxiety started. At first it was just the usual mild stress at having to make a phone call to a stranger about a job. Not that big a deal. As a freelancer, I have to do that periodically, and I find it stressful, but...working is good. Then I kept thinking and ruminating about the fact that he's in his 80s, and hard of hearing, and possibly difficult to understand; and I started having these horrible visions of not being able to make myself understood if I called, or not being able to understand anything he said, or having my brain freeze up and not being able to communicate clearly.

Normally, when I have to make a phone call and I'm anxious about it, I have to just eventually decide to DO it--and by the time I hit that "dial" button it's too late to NOT do it, if that makes sense. At that point I just have to suck it up and get it over with. But if I've managed to get myself overly anxious about it, I start to feel like the worst possible scenario I can think of will in fact pan out, or at the very least, my brain will implode. Today, I could hardly manage to convince myself to make that call. ONE phone call to a person I don't know for a job that I want, okay. TWO phone calls to people I don't know, one of whom might not understand me and I might not understand them--well, that's just panic-inducing.

Part of me almost would have preferred to call the alumna back and tell her I couldn't do the job after all, but the other part of me realized how utterly ridiculous that would be. I did manage to make the call. It took me a few hours to work up to it, and some considerable self-bribery with coffee and a long reading break and the promise of having gotten it over with.

As it turned out, I could understand the guy just fine 98% of the time. I mean, my mom taught college-aged ESL students for 15-plus years. I'm used to deciphering accents. Hell, a good portion of my family and stepfamily are from different countries and have accents. Evidently, in my anxiety, I had forgotten these important facts. Also, he seemed to be able to hear me OK, for someone in his 80s, for cripes' sake. I'm still anxious because I'm supposed to call him back in a couple of days to arrange an in-person meeting, but for some reason that stresses me out less than a phone call. Go figure.

"It's about 300 pages," he said, when we were talking about the project. "Does that scare you?" "No," I said, laughing. And no, it doesn't--it doesn't scare me nearly as much as having had to make that stupid phone call.

Exterminate! Exterminate!

I just spent ten minutes on the phone with a freaky robotic voice from Blue Cross (my insurance provider) asking me various questions about the effectiveness of my current therapist situation. I've had to take very short phone surveys from robot voices before, but not for TEN MINUTES. Nor did previous robot voices ever actually RESPOND to my answers other than a standard "thank you" or (in the case of the prescription refill robot at my pharmacy) a confirmation of my last name.

For instance, the Blue Cross phone robot asked me to tell her/it the effectiveness of my visits to my therapist by stating "no improvement, some improvement, much improvement." When I said "some improvement," the robot voice said, "that's great!" I found this profoundly disturbing. I wonder if I'd said "no improvement," it would have said "sorry to hear that." Plus I kept trying to psych out the robot because I was suspicious whether my insurance company is trying to weasel out of paying for my therapist visits by tricking me into saying I no longer need them. A robot! I was trying to PSYCH OUT A PHONE ROBOT! Something is seriously wrong.