Mortaine’s Blog

I cut the armhole in the wrong place in my Halloween costume.

More glue.

The rain started this week, providing a minor setback in the Halloween Costume Manufacturing Project. Mind you, I want this done by Saturday, and of course, right now I have it constructed, but not painted. Without paint, it looks pretty ridiculous, so I’m going to try very hard to get it painted by this weekend. I think if I do 3 coats tomorrow morning, weather permitting, and spray the detail work on tomorrow evening after I get back from the con, let it dry overnight, it should be in good shape for Saturday night’s Masquerade at SiliCon, which is where I will be this weekend.

Letters back and forth with Hertz rental car agency last month, relating to my August 15-20 rental reservation in Grand Rapids:

From me:
I should not be surprised that I can’t even get a mailing address to send this letter of complaint. Last month, I was on a book tour in michigan, promoting my recently published book on videoblogging. Seriously, I now wish I’d had the camera rolling, because your company’s actions…. really worth getting on film.

I had reserved an economy car to pick up at 4 PM. My Greyhound bus was late getting into Grand Rapids (it left 30 minutes late) and because the rental station doesn’t have a sign where one can easily see it from the street, I missed the stop and had to walk back, adding about 10 minutes to my travel time. I arrived at 4:55, only to be told that the rental agent had given my car away. He didn’t even apologize for it, and only made a half-hearted attempt to find me a replacement car.

It astounds me that, in a time when travellers are frisked every time they turn around, during a heightened Red Alert security phase at the airports, that anyone in any phase of the travel industry would consider a delay of less than an hour to be sufficient reason to give away someone’s confirmed reservation. I won’t delve into the inconvenience your agent’s actions caused to me personally; it was not small, but the folks at another rental agency were very helpful, as they were when I needed to rent a car last week, and as they will be the next time I need to rent again.

I sincerely hope that Hertz received a lot of money from the economy car rental your agent yanked out from underneath me, because I will never, EVER rent from Hertz again.

Sincerely, Stephanie Bryant

Hertz’s official reply: (emphasis mine)
Dear Ms. Bryant:

Thank you for your E-mail regarding the problems you encountered in Grand Rapids. We appreciate the opportunity to review your concerns.

Hertz prepares vehicles one hour prior to the reserved arrival time. Vehicles are kept approximately thirty minutes after the set time of arrival. When you arrived outside this time frame, your vehicle was no longer available. We sincerely apologize that the representative did not handle this situation in a more professional manner.

As a service oriented company, we rely on customer feedback to help us maintain and improve our service standards. Please be assured the appropriate management will be sent a copy of your comments for their review and corrective action.

Thank you again for contacting us. We appreciate your business and hope we will have the opportunity to serve you in the future.

Sincerely,

Maraida Lopez
OKC Customer Relations

For all correspondence sent USPS, please use the address below.

The Hertz Corporation
Attn: Customer Relations Department
P.O. Box 26120
Oklahoma City, OK 73126
U.S.A.

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At least I got a snail-mail address to use if I ever want to follow up! Apparently, it is their policy to give you only a 30 minute window to pick up your car, even though the rest of the travel industry thinks absolutely nothing of delaying you for hours!

Now, I’m not going to use this as another Call to Action to boycott Hertz, much as I would like to. I’ll never use them again, and I *hope* my friends will consider joining me in that choice. Particularly if you’re an author and you ever do book tours and speaking engagements. I can’t imagine, if this had happened when I was in St. Louis, what I would have done– probably called weeping. As it was, I had to call my stepmother to come to my rescue, and thank goodness I wasn’t in a city where I have no support network to help out!

In a word: unacceptable. Simple unacceptable.

I dreamed in French last night.

For absolutely no good reason.

Oh, and yes, it was correct French, complete with a proper usage of conduire.