To: Customer Service, Hertz Rent A Car
Late Saturday evening, September 13th 2003, I received news at my home in New York that my step-father had died suddenly in an accident. I spent the next day scouring the internet for airplane tickets and rental car reservations so that I could get to my mom in rural Texas the next day. I found a reasonable, one way fare for myself, my husband and my four year old son to Houston, a four and a half hour drive from my mom. I proceeded to investigate rental car rates and was pleased to find a situation with Hertz where I could drop off the car in Waco, the closest city to my mom's home. I bought the plane tickets and then made the rental car reservation online with my credit card and received a confirmation number. I was very pleased with the open ended arrangement that this afforded us because I didn't know how long my family would need to stay.
When we got to Houston, we were horrified to find that our MasterCard, issued by our bank, would not be accepted by your company. We were hundreds of miles from our final destination, travel-weary and mourning the loss of a loved one.
My complaint goes in two directions. First, I should not have received a confirmation number for the car rental if my credit card was unacceptable. If I had any doubt about the legitimacy of my reservation, I would have made completely different travel plans.
Second is my disgust of your discrimination against bank issued cards. My family makes a conscious decision to not involve ourselves in debt. Your policy insists that your customers engage in an activity that is financially unwise and often damaging to personal finances. It has nothing to do with a person's ability to afford to rent a car and everything to do with the politics of debt and finance. We had plenty of money in our bank account to cover the car rental and any security deposit that you might have required.
Another company got our business, but we got no satisfaction from it. We were forced to pay four times the amount of my original reservation with Hertz in order to keep the car for a week because no other rental company had a drop off available in Waco. We were forced to limit our stay and leave earlier than we would have liked. We were forced to buy another one way ticket out of Houston, so that we could return the car, rather than a closer airport in Austin or Dallas. If I had suspected that any of this was going to happen, I would have paid more money to fly into an airport closer to my mom.
My husband has renamed your company Hurts Rent A Car.
My mom returned to Texas from her New York blackout experience to find her husband changed. They got married when Steve and I did, six years ago this October, and we had never known him to be anything but a loving and gentle man. I was so happy that my mom was starting a new life with him.
Suddenly he was not himself, in a variety of disturbing and disruptive ways. Early one morning the police had to be summoned and Buddy was hospitalized. Buddy was bi-polar, but stopped taking his meds a few years ago.
My mom spent three long weeks hoping that the hospital would be able to stabilize him on meds and that she might have her husband back. They were in the midst of building a house that they had been planning and dreaming about for several years. He had recently retired and planned to start a nursery that sold plants native to Texas. My mom wanted to retire and raise alpacas. They had a lot of wonderful plans.
This past week, Buddy was released from the hospital and my brother drove to their house from LA to be with them and help out. We were a little worried for her safety, she lives way out in the middle of nowhere. Buddy came home, but was so heavily medicated his body would twitch and he slept a lot.
When I spoke to him, he said, "Did you know that they still give people electroshock therapy?"
I was dismayed, "Did they shock you?"
"No" he said, "they only give it to people who are depressed. It's amazing how many people are depressed."
Last night, too late for a normal phone call, my brother called: "It's awful, Buddy's dead."
He was out on the four-wheeler, and was found where he hit a tree by his former father-in-law, who owns much of the land around there. They were friends.
He may have just had an accident, or he may have had a heart attack. We are off to Texas tomorrow. Please send my mom loving thoughts or prayers if you do that sort of thing. Her world has been turned upsidedown.
Soccer was great on Sunday, but unfortunately, the houses weren't. One was in Chatham Village and that the other was in Old Chatham. They are both for rent or sale.
We looked at the Chatham Village one first, and the owner told me that there were nightmare tennants there and that she was going to have to evict them. They had told her that they didn't have the rent this month because their dog had been killed. (Steve wondered if the dog was the one earning money.) Sure enough, when we pulled into the driveway, on the side of the garage was a little grave with flowers for the dog. The house is on a busy road.
Before we got out of the car, Aidan announced that it was an old house and that he didn't like old houses.
The tennants were in fact a mess, though they were making an effort to clean up for our visit. It was hard to not see the house through them though. It was a modest farmhouse with two bedrooms upstairs and a room downstairs that was being used as a third bedroom. The family has three kids that are probably middle school aged. I hope they aren't paying rent because they are saving money for first month's rent and security somewhere else. It's an ugly situation.
We had high hopes for the second house because we wanted one of them to work. Aidan immediately expressed his disappointment that this one was old too. (When Aidan says old, he means run-down. He insists that our friends' well kept Victorian is a "new" house.) This house was in a rural setting, but very close to I-90. It had been bought and renovated in order to rent or re-sell for a profit, so it had all brand new everything, though the renovation was not finished yet so it was a bit of a construction zone. It was very small. We were told it was a two bedroom, but the bedrooms were awkward - one was right by the front door and the other was the second floor of the house, and the stairs were very steep, as is often the case in very old houses. The location was much farther north than anything that we were familiar with, in what is apparently a very wealthy town, which does us no good at all unless we want to be close to the Old Chatham Tennis Club.
So we left feeling like it could work, but the price was a little above our price range, and it seemed to involve too many compromises to pay top dollar for. We already did that once with the barn. The way that the bedrooms were set up, I couldn't imagine transitioning Aidan into his own room and bed there. There was no room for Steve's tools and ladders. The bathroom was not finished, but there was not going to be a tub, just a shower. (In the barn we had a tub but no shower.) We'd spend half our lives driving.
Whenever we talked about it, I would bring up the Chatham Village house and Steve would spit venom about it. He didn't want to have anything to do with that house, but also acknowledged that it was mostly the tennants that bothered him. However, it had some good features, and the selling price is in our price range. It's on a nice, large, flat lot, it has a two car garage and although it is on a main road, it is a good, central location.
So where we're at now is looking at the house again with the eyes of potential buyers. It's not on the market and it might be possible that the owners would hold the mortgage for us for a couple of years. Even if they wouldn't, I think we could get a mortgage for it. Another possibility presented itself this week - my friend who is an accountant has a client that needs to unload a small house on seven acres, and is willing to do it for a shockingly low price if it can happen quickly. He hasn't returned my calls yet, so this may be one of those things that's too good to be true, plus, my experience with these things is that they are never quick when a mortgage is involved.
In the meanwhile we are committed too trekking up there every weekend for soccer. Aidan loved it so much that he brought the soccer ball to bed that night. The sight of the shin guards lights up his face.
This was written on Friday, but Blogger was out of order.
I've been a bad bad blogger - reading everybody else's blog and not writing in my own. I find myself wishing people would update more often and then noticing the state of my own blog. I've been reading Dervala and Riverbend avidly and wishing more people were posting at Sustenance.
I've been kicking the name Dervala around in my head if the baby's a girl. Would that be weird, to have two kids with these completely Irish names? Steve is mostly Irish, but I am mostly not. The pronunciation is here.
Riverbend is an Iraqi woman and I found myself relating information from her blog to the family at dinner. We were using what seemed like an enormous amount of dishes and utensils for soup-salad-meal-serving utensils etc. I mentioned that she had posted that her family often had no water and how that effects everyday life, specifically that they use dishes as little as possible. Then I mentioned that there was another Iraqi blogger, a man, but that I appreciated her POV as a woman who can no longer leave the house without accompaniament, whose job wouldn't rehire her after the "war" because they couldn't guarantee her safety. My SIL wanted to know how long women had lived like this in Iraq.
Do people not realize that Iraq was a secular country before the US invaded? That women largely enjoyed equal priviledges as men? That the danger women are in now in Iraq is completely a result of lawlessness since the US invasion? That we have created a power vacuum that is attracting Islamic fundamentalists, the people who hate us? DO YOU REALIZE THIS? It was news to my husband's well read and well educated politically liberal family.
The housing update: I sent an e-mail to everyone that I know in Columbia County last week and I got so many leads, people trying to help, it made me feel so so good and cared for. One woman, who I don't even know that well, gave me the number of another woman who has TWO houses for rent! They are a tiny bit more expensive than we wanted, but if they are good, we can manage it.
I signed Aidan up for soccer upstate, not knowing when we'd get up there. I was grateful that they even let me sign him up from here. I got a call from his coach that his first practice is on Sunday afternoon, so I called the woman who own the houses and asked if we could come on Sunday. It turns out she coaches the same age group in the same league and will be there at the same park that afternoon, so we will meet up with her afterwards and go see the houses.
The other big thing that I am doing is diving back into developing the Tarot website that I started over a year ago. I had two big hurdles, one was getting an agreement with a publisher to use a deck and the other was making a logo. When I first started working on it again, I was totally going crazy, spinning my wheels in my head, I just couldn't seem to get it going, but I think I've got some momentum going now and things seem to be falling into place. I found a deck with an Italian company that might be more agreeable than US Games (which gave me a sort of "no, because I said so"). As for the logo, I had a conversation with a graphic designer from upstate who might need someone to code a website that she had designed. We ultimately got to talking about doing trades and she said that she would be up for it. She used to work for Martha Stewart Living, and I know that professional logo design can be terribly expensive, so I was nervous asking her, but she actually brought it up! She even made me feel better by telling me that all designers have trouble doing work for themselves and that she knows designers who have traded to design each other's promotional material. That was such a relief to hear, because it was making me feel really incompetent.
By the way, we're going to need beta testers for the tarot readings.
I'm also reading Zeldman's book and it is totally blowing my mind and making me really excited to dive into doing web design more seriously. Actually, I've always been really serious about the web design, it's the money making that I haven't been real slick with. But reading this book is making me feel more confident and valuable. I have often felt inadequate because I can't do backend programming and don't really aspire to. I also don't really do graphic design. I mean, I can, but I'm not trained in it and there are a lot of holes in my graphic design knowlege. But everything that I can do is given a lot of value in this book, and that has been really good for my confidence. I completely get everything Zeldman says in this book - every little thing.
I can't wait to get back upstate and get on with my life.
I just uploaded a post about gardening at the suburban house of neglect at sustenance.org.
Sorry my page is loading so slowly the past few days. Yaccs, my commenting system seems to be down and its mucking up the loading of the page.