A Wild Car Story (part 2)

We returned to the convention center, vying for sidewalk space with an increasing number of Riverfest attendees. We found the bathroom (where the sink handle proceeded to break off in my hand), and we sank into a couple chairs outside the vendor hall just in time for the call.

The conversation started poorly. “The tow company can’t get you until midnight,” claimed Roadside Service. “There’s some festival in downtown Wichita that has brought in 10,000 extra people and is closing all the roads there.”

I jumped up to grab a map from the conference hosts. “Tell them I can get them here! These roads aren’t closed!” I gestured frantically at the map while Brit-Brit attempted to listen both to me and the Roadside Service agent. She calmly relayed my insistence to the agent.

“I’m very sorry, but we simply cannot retrieve the car until midnight. And we cannot release a new car to you until the current one has been towed. Let me check if we can deliver a car to you by 7am.”

Brit-Brit and I resumed our seats, she calmly explaining the dilemma, I fuming at inefficiency and poor service. Our opposing approaches to the situation resulted in quite the brilliant (and logical) brainstorm: if the rental car company couldn’t get a car to our hotel by 7am, we would simply have to cancel our contract and find another rental company.

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"Did you push the start button?"

"Yes, we've tried everything and the car won't start."

"Does the key have a square end or a rounded end?"

Silence.

"Ma’am?"

"Um, it has a kind of rounded square end?"

Brit-Brit and our new Roadside Service agent, Charlie, repeated this conversation for about 10 minutes, finally determining that indeed it was not operator error and the car was truly broken. Meanwhile, I evaded overambitious homeschool security guards and finally found my convention contact to ask if we could catch a lift to our hotel.

When we reunited at the car, Charlie had managed to cut through a great deal of red tape on our behalf, to the point where he practically promised the delivery of a new car to our hotel within the hour. We manually locked the car, leaving the key under the backseat, and hiked all our stuff back to the convention center, where kindly board members of the convention delivered us to our hotel.

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The saga closed without much more drama: we finally ate dinner (huzzah for Pizza Hut delivery!) and the car arrived about 10:15pm. The whole episode only took three hours, though it felt much longer. And that leaves one more life lesson learned the hard way: always listen to your rental car’s feelings.