Satan's Minions

*the fonts are wonky in this post and I can't seem to fix it. Apologies in advance!

*WARNING* Lots of ranting ahead! Feel free to skip over the big block of text below to the cute pictures at the end. 

A few weeks ago I wrote on Facebook that the lowest circle was reserved for betrayers and insurance adjusters. We've been dealing with this garbage for two months now and it still isn't over yet. I'm so sick of the whole thing. But let me tell you about another group of special people, they are the nice enough looking folks working behind the counters of car rental companies. Don't ever let yourself be fooled by their normal looking outer appearance. These people are Satan's minions. Evil incarnated. They will suck all the joy and happiness from your life. So my niece was getting married and my mom was flying into town so Brian reserved me a rental car for a few days so that we could run errands and stuff. We went last Saturday to Dollar car rental at the airport to pick up a car that we had reserved through Wednesday. The lady behind the counter asked if we were purchasing insurance or if we had our own coverage. We had our own insurance but we didn't have collision but it wasn't a big deal, Brian hopped on the phone with our insurance company and added collision and had them fax it to Dollar right away. Everything should have been fine, except our new coverage didn't start until midnight. Oops. But the we noticed that Dollar offered their own insurance, so we asked if we could purchase just one day of their coverage. The lady behind the counter looked perplexed, she just kept insisting that she could not rent us a car if we didn't have collision. We even pointed to the sign they had up with their daily insurance rates but for some reason she just kept refusing to rent us the car. Finally we gave up and we went over the next counter which was Budget and rented a car with their insurance for just one day. Brian just cancelled the reservation with Dollar and made a new reservation for the following day at noon. We returned the car to Budget the next day at 11:50 and went to pick up the receipt and found that it was 20 dollars more than the price we were quoted the previous day. Turns out there are all kinds of "fees" and taxes. Whatever. After picking up our receipt from Budget we went over to the Dollar counter to pick up our reservation. Again. This time we had proof of collision coverage and we thought everything would be fine. Well, when the lady printed out our invoice we noticed that they charged us for an extra day. When Brian asked why the lady flippantly said that it was because we picked it up early. It was 11:57 and our reservation was for noon. I thought Brian's eyeballs were going to pop out of his head. We asked if we could just wait 3 minutes but she insisted because she had already run the credit card and printed the invoice that there was nothing she could do. Yeah. By this point we both were so frustrated that we just took the car and left. About an hour later Brian realized that he had left our mail in the Budget car that we had just turned in. He drove back to the airport immediately to see if he could get it. They refused to let him look in the car, saying it was a liability. They sent someone to look and they couldn't find it. We knew the mail was in the car, we had brought it with us to drop off at the post office but we were in a hurry to get the car back in time so we decided to do it on the way home instead but had forgotten because of all the garbage with getting charged extra and stuff. And these two pieces of mail were our rent check and our state tax refund. So basically they contained all of our vital information, our bank account numbers, social security numbers, our address, etc. Brian came home and transferred all of our money out of our checking account and we just hoped that no one would steal our identities. We were considering calling social security and putting a fraud alert on our numbers but since we were about to buy a car that wasn't an option. Seriously, I was having anxiety attacks all day and was just so freaking frustrated with the companies by this point. We did luck out a few hours later though when Budget called to tell us that they did indeed find the mail. But I think the whole experience put me and Brian off of car rental companies for life and we bought a car the very next day. 

Now here are some happy, cute, flowery pictures that have nothing to do with the ridiculous, idiotic, rude car rental companies. 

Oh and we bought a Honda Civic so hopefully it will last us 20 years or so. I want to avoid those car rental companies for as long as I can.