When we arrived at the rental car counter on Saturday night (actually in the first minutes of Sunday), we had traversed an airport more poorly designed than any I’ve been in in a long time. San Francisco has spent years and billions renovating and rebuilding and reconnecting and reworking their tired old airport. They have not succeeded in creating something better than they had before. There were few signs to the rental car arena (consolidated into a ghastly fluorescent hallway reminiscent of the office in Joe vs. The Volcano), and we rode the elevator a number of times before seeing the tiny 2-point font letters on the floor of the parking garage “AirTrain Rental Cars”. A suspicious looking French-accented man did try to accost us and lead us to the rental cars via a shortcut, but I accosted him right back with my east coast snottiness and told him to get lost. After wandering for about 30 minutes trying to find the damn cars, I was ready to go back and beg him to show us the way.

By the time we discovered that they still do rent cars at the San Francisco airport, we were in line behind about 10 other people at the Hertz counter (not number 1 for nothing – it can buy you a lot of arrogance, which was evidence by a guy walking off shift while there were about 30 people in line). There was much grumbling and jockeying for position – I almost ran to get in front of two men, ending up behind two twentysomethings who appeared to be dressed for a skate board tournament. They were trading comments about the party they had attended the prior night, the quality of the women present (not very good), the quality of the drugs (much better), and some concern about how much the rental they were returning was going to cost them.

While I was waiting with increasingly clenched jaw, I shamelessly eavesdropped on the rental return conversation that was happening in front of me, which was enough to cause my jaw to unlock and fall open. The renter claimed that the minivan he had rented (he was so not the minivan type and I’m willing to bet that he took a lot of shit for his vehicle) had been left outside the place he had stayed the night before (presumably the house of ill-repute that contained the good-drugs-ugly-girls party) and that when he got up, the battery had been stolen. There was some explanation that he had left the van unlocked because there were too many people in the house using the van to lock it, which I’m sure scored points with Hertz as they want their cars to be used by as many drug users as possible.

When asked how he had gotten to the airport, he claimed that he and his friend had jumpstarted the van several times along the way (can you drive a car without a battery? What exactly do you jumpstart? Is there someplace else you can connect the cables so that the car starts? This is astounding news!). He claimed that, despite not having paid for any insurance on the car, he was not liable for the damages (which he purported were not damages at all, since the car didn’t have any scratches on it) because HE HAD BEEN ASLEEP. This is an ingenious excuse that I plan to use at every opportunity – speeding, income tax evasion, delinquent bill paying – the consequences of these and all other annoying infractions can be avoided by the SLEEPING excuse.

The manager was summoned and I was distracted by the Hertz woman who testily asked me if I had reserved the car for Sunday or Monday, to which I replied, icily, that it would have been Sunday had they had adequate staff in place. She was not amused. She summoned a manager to deal with me as well, and I had visions of her manipulating my credit card transaction in such a way that it appeared my card had been stolen. It turns out that we were being escorted to our car, not because I had gotten snippy, but because we had rented a “premier” car that demanded management attention to ensure that we were satisfied with the car. When I mentioned the story of the skate boarding, drug using, battery losing renters, the manager snorted and said that they had originally rented the van because their own car had a, can you believe it?, dead battery. I wonder if Hertz has Lo-Jack on their batteries? Welcome to California.