The Rental Car That Fought Back

There’s a gas smell coming from my air conditioning. Poor little Beepers (that’s my car), he seems to be leaking both engine coolant and gas. Luckily, my service rep at the VW shop will often give me a deal to help out with costly repairs. This time I’m really going to need it, the repair bill alone should be $600-700 for the fuel tank.

Phone conversation with my rep at 4pm:
VW: Your insurance guys won’t be in, it’s 6pm on the East coast.
Me: Okay.
VW: You wanna come down here and get a rental car?
Me: I have an event tomorrow—I’ll need som’um ...
VW: I’ll pay for it.
Me: Well, shit. If you’re gonna pay for it, I’ll be there in an hour. How long you there tonight, Kathy?
VW: I leave at 6pm.
Me: I’ll be there at 5pm.

She has my papers waiting when I get there. I walk over to the rental place and I’m excited to see a cute guy working. I’m also a little turned on when the dude tries to speak Spanish with the car wash Latinos bringing in the car keys. “How many cars are there? uh ... quantos cars are there?” he says. Que cute, no?

But then he offers me a Cavalier. Kill me now.

The car already knows I hate it even before I start driving. I don’t buy the extra insurance cute rental guy tries to sell me— that probably makes me suspicious in the car’s eyes. But, it drives well enough and I’m excited to see that I like four of the six presets on the car’s radio: r&b, rock, hip-hop, and dance stantion. We might get along after all, I think to myself as I bump Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River.”

When I get home I swing open the door with quite a bit of force (you have to do that in my VW just to open the damn thing) ...

... and it slams right back into my head. Bastard.