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Zipcar Sucks. Period.

20 Jun

June 20, 2021

Zipcar is a car sharing service in which you rent a car and pick it up at a public location, usually a parking lot. I’ve used them three times and it has been a problem every single time.

TRIP 1. There was no car available in my area so I had to book one a twenty minute ride away. I wasn’t too upset (yet) since Zipcar would reimburse me for the cost of my trip. So to be clear, I was taking an Uber to get to the car I rented. (Problem #1.) But when I got to the public municipal lot the car was parked in, it wasn’t there. So I had to take another, half hour, ride to another Zipcar even further away. And when I retuned the car to that location, I had a now 40 minute Uber ride back home. Convenient? NOT.

TRIP 2. I managed to book a car in a location only a short walk away. Sound good? Yes. Smell good? No. The car was filthy and stunk like someone had eviscerated an antelope in the back seat.

How did it look? Judge for yourself.

So I called Zipcar and they gave me two options. I could get another car, with the very minor caveat that the only other available car was in another borough, or I could run this one through a car wash and they would reimburse me.

Screw that, I am not doing their work for them. I shoved the trash in the trunk (let Zipcar worry about it) and drove around with the windows open. After only three hours it was breathable in there.

TRIP 3. Today is Father’s Day and knowing it would be hard to get a car, I rented one close by three weeks in advance. And two days before the trip, I got notified that due to an issue with the car, I was being switched to a car a half hour trip away. What was wrong with the car? I don’t know. I called customer support to complain and the guy on the other end, who was clearly simply reading from a script, informed me, through a thick internationally outsourced accent, that the car was unavailable due to, well, I don’t know. Unless the car really did have schmegma dripping out of the tailpipe, I couldn’t understand him. And that is not the worst part. That’s when I got to the car and it would not unlock. Since Zipcar has no physical rental locations to get keys they do everything over their app, including sending a signal to unlock the car. Oh, there are keys, they are just locked inside the car until Zipcar sends the unlock signal. And this car would not unlock. So I called customer support and they could not unlock it, and they had no one that could, you know, show up with a key and unlock it, and of course, this being Father’s Day there was not a single car available at all.

Yes, I called customer support and ranted and raved, and yes, I spoke to a “supervisor” (who may have been the same guy, I swear they sounded so much alike) and no, I accomplished nothing except I got to use “ugotz” on a recorded call, which has been a goal of mine for quite some time.

So, no I am not spending this Father’s Day with my family. SCREW YOU, ZIPCAR.

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A Tale of My Father: The (Almost) Burning Man

26 Mar

March 26, 2018

My father was a man who had quite a lot of stories, and I can vouch that they were true. Stuck in a rioting hoard of women on Black Friday, calling Macy’s to complain about their Santa at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, or refusing to take off in a small plane from the shortest runway of an airport high on cliff, he had some interesting things to talk about. 

This one is short, and though it happened long before I was born, it could have had a dramatic impact on my life.

When he was younger, my Dad-to-be and some of his friends took a road trip. The details of when and where aren’t important and I’ve long forgotten them if I even ever knew them. I want to say they were teenagers but knowing Dad and some of his friends, they were probably in their twenties but acting like teenagers. 

So they were driving and it was getting late and they stopped for gas. One guy got out and was pumping while Dad and the others took the opportunity to stretch their legs. Well, they guy pumping the gas thought it would be a hysterically funny joke to turn the nozzle on Dad and soak him with gasoline. And another friend thought it would be even more hysterically funny to chase Dad around the car with a lit cigarette lighter. 

You can see where this is going.

Almost, almost!

Natural selection nearly took a hard left turn that night but either Dad was a faster runner back then, or his cries of “what the FUCK are you doing?” got through this friend’s thick skull and Dad escaped immolation and lived to laugh about it later.

It’s a wonder I’m here to write about this.

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