When plans fail, keep going

“I don’t understand. I have a reservation. Do you have my reservation?”

“Yes, we do. Unfortunately, we ran out of cars.”

“But thanks to the reservation, the car stays here. That’s what reservations are for.”

“I know why we have reservations.”

“I don’t think so. If that were the case, I would have a car.”

— “Seinfeld,” Season 3, Episode 11, 1991

Earlier this month, I found myself in exactly that “Seinfeld” scenario – with a surprising twist that somehow led to a happy ending.

Buckle up and get going because it’s going to be a bit bumpy.

My wife, Sherrie, and I had just driven our RV down Highway 299 for a long weekend on the coast, safely negotiating the hairpin turns and steep cliffs in record time. (I apologize to anyone stuck behind me.) We pulled into an RV park in Arcata, hooked up, and called Uber to drive to the Arcata-Eureka Airport, where I had reserved a rental car. (I won’t reveal the name of the company, but let’s just say it’s a well-known company whose name is somewhere in the masthead of this newspaper.)

When I got to the counter, I said I had a reservation and gave my last name. The rental car guy looked and said, “Sorry. We don’t have any cars. You can try again in two or three hours.”

I was about to say, “But I had a reservation,” but then I remembered the “Seinfeld” episode. (Unfortunately, there were no cars available at all, so the Seinfeld strategy of renting a compact car, paying the insurance, and then “smashing it” wasn’t an option.) So I shuffled a few feet to the right to the Avis counter in the hopes that I could rent a car there.

I began my speech, and that’s when this encounter, to use a favorite word of the day, became strange.

Just as the Avis lady was looking at cars, I was quite surprised when the guy from Enterprise (oops! I gave it away) walked into the Avis booth and snuck up behind her while I was talking. I was even more surprised when the guy slowly reached around her waist and grabbed her midsection. and start tickling her — while she was talking to me, the already dissatisfied customer.

(At this point, I should probably mention that Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s official slogan is “We’ll pick you up.” At the very least, I guess I have to give this employee credit for taking the slogan to previously unimaginable levels.)

She turned around, giggled, and spoke to him in a way that made it painfully clear that this wasn’t the first such encounter between the two of them. So I just stood there, mouth open, watching this obvious reenactment of a 1990s sexual harassment training film.

After the “we’ll pick you up” guy returned to his booth, the woman from Avis turned her attention back to me, long enough to tell me that she didn’t have any cars either. So I was stuck. I had no choice but to pay for another Uber ride back to Arcata, where I had to explain to my wife why I had just set out on a two-hour drive to rent a car, but returned without a car.

Hey, these things happen. But the next morning I woke up with a mission. It had to somewhere in Humboldt County to rent a car, right? I googled and googled and googled some more and finally said to my wife, “The one thing that keeps coming up is U-Haul locations.”

And then it hit me.

U-Haul rents pickup trucks. At $19.99 a day plus mileage, it’s a fraction of what Enterprise would charge me for a car that doesn’t exist. Why not?

An hour and a half later, we were on our way to the beach—with the dogs!—in a brand new Chevrolet U-Haul pickup truck. The dogs had a blast on the beach, and we had a great time driving around in the truck the rest of the day, often bursting into laughter at the absurdity of it all. One of us broke every law by riding in the back of the truck for the 4-mile back road to the beach while the dogs (on leashes) jumped around with a joy that only a dog in the back of a truck can feel.

You can’t create such memories in a rented Ford Escort.

The next morning, after parking the truck and waiting for my sixth Uber ride of the weekend, I had a few minutes to think about everything.

I guess my main question is this: How can a major company’s inventory system be so incredibly out of whack in 2024? (Especially 33 years after that “Seinfeld” episode became a national punchline?) One of my Uber drivers actually told me that he spends a lot of his time picking up angry people at the airport who have reserved a car, only to find out upon arrival that there are no cars. Why would he continue to pull the charade and take the reservation?