National Rental Car is an organization run by hellspawn.

This is not an exaggeration but literal truth. If you are able to guess their true name you can briefly glimpse their true forms: an undulating mass of pus and boils, cloven-hooved, their slavering maws spewing harsh invectives about your mother in a thousand dead tongues. Be careful, for after they disappear, leaving only a wisp of smoke and a faint smell of brimstone, they will be replaced by a demon from a circle of hell reserved for the treacherous: the Manager.

The demon you have just defeated may have denied their existence, saying the Manager is off-duty, or on vacation, or resides on a plane of existence only accessible to transcendental beings and opium freaks. The Manager is far more frustrating for they are just as unwilling to help you as their underlings but their constant refrain of “No” carries far more finality. They are the last resort before you must call Customer Service, which connects you directly to one of the three mouths of Lucifer which, in between chews, have accents remarkably similar to Indians.

Perhaps I should explain.

We decided to rent a car because:

1. We were transporting several tons of wedding-related cargo (wedding dress, bridal party dresses, wedding favors, programs, petal cones, menus, placecards, and the list goes on and on…)
2. We were packing for a 30 day Honeymoon (that turned into a 38 days)
3. We were travelling all over Florida throughout the trip
4. Lisa is deathly afraid of flying

So, for most of the above reasons, we also decided we would rent a minivan for 35 days (gave ourselves some wiggle room because we were planning on spending a day or two in Savannah, Georgia and possibly the same in Washington, DC on the way back home).

We went with National because they were one of the few rental car agencies that allows you to rent with a debit card. This is prominently displayed on their website. I called several times to make sure that you could rent with a debit card and was met with the same response each time: “Of course! It says it on the website, doesn’t it?”

Yes, it does. Of course, on the rental agreement it said that they accept debit cards at select locations, so I checked to make sure they did at the one I had chosen. They said they did. I should’ve realized I was talking to Indian Lucifer when he said that.

We went to rent the car and, as you might have guessed by now, they didn’t accept debit cards.

We didn’t have any credit cards with a large enough open balance to cover the cost of the rental car. They accept debit upon the return of the car, but not when you rent it.

After an hour of angry customer interaction, pointless phone calls to Old Scratch, and frantic searching for a family member with a credit card, my aunt made the 45-minute trip to the airport to put it on hers. This, of course ended up costing us more money because Lisa and I needed to be added as additional drivers at an additional fee per day.

Oh, and they couldn’t rent us the minivan for more than 30 days despite the fact that the rental agreement I had in my hand was for 35 days. Some bull about their computers having a time limit.

Iris, the demon-in-charge, assured me that my rental period could be honored, but I would have to call her at the 30-day mark and she would renew the car for an additional week of the phone.

I called. Iris, naturally, was not available. I called back when they said she would be. She wasn’t. I asked the man that answered the phone, Mike, (a name that is always associated with the darkest evil) if he could help me renew the rental car lease. He said he could and 20 minutes later we were exchanging pleasantries and I was on my way.

Then, a few days later, I got a frantic phone call from my aunt that a representative from National had called her to say that the minivan had been reported stolen.

I called the National representative to resolve the issue but got her voicemail. I explained the situation. I was never called back. Figuring this would be the case, as soon as I had left my message I called back and somehow was able to get ahold of Iris. She explained that Mike had just left a note for someone else to do what he said he was doing in the 20 minutes he had me on the phone. This note was promptly lost. She would reprimand Mike but he wasn’t there that day.

Upon returning my car, I found that for the week that I extended past 30 days, I was charged a much higher rate, resulting in a cost a couple hundred dollars more than my rental agreement stated. Iris materialized, the blood of countless sinners staining her gnarled claws, to explain that despite the fact I had a rental agreement, the 30-day computers overrides it and any extension beyond that is considered a new rental agreement where they can make up any rate they like without telling you.

When I was on the phone with Mike, I had asked him what the cost would be for the week to doublecheck. He said that he couldn’t tell me, that Iris could, but he was sure it would be what I expected. When I was on the phone with Iris after the minivan had been reported stolen, she told me that in order to get me a price she would have to go over to a different computer system and that would take a lot of time and we had already been on the phone for half an hour so wouldn’t I like to get back to my honeymoon?

So they beat me. I was broken down, a shell of my former self. All fight was taken out of me and they were free to sully any and all of my already-bleeding orifices. And they did.

So if you feel like having your the various holes of your body, even the small ones, ravaged by unspeakable monsters from the deepest, darkest pits of the netherworld, rent a car from National.
I promise that the rest of my posts (as far as I can remember) will be about how happy and wonderful the rest of the trip was. And they’ll have pictures. It’s just that this dark stain on an otherwise flawless trip was the first part of the whole thing and thus the first story.

Oh, and after all that, I don’t actually have pictures of the damned minivan. It was a Pontiac Montana. Here’s a picture of me driving it back from the rental car place, smiling through my tears: