Shared Opinion

27 June 2009

I want to live in the country in which the Ayatollah Khamenei thinks I already do

Seize the day, guys. This is the British PR opportunity of the century. Robert Mugabe slags us off all the time, but he only thinks we’re a bunch of feckless homosexuals. These Iranians, though, they rate us. They think we are global supermen. They think that we are operating out there in the world, slyly perhaps, but with a vision and a philosophy and a point and a purpose. If only they were right.

Is there anybody out there, among the legions of clever people who read The Spectator, who works in the car rental business? Get in touch.

I want to know what you are playing at. I’m sure you have reasons for behaving as you do. I just can’t think what they might be. I want to hire a car. So I go online, and I fill out a form, and I put in my credit card details and suchlike, and then I get a nice little email saying, yes, well done, your car has been hired. So why is it that, weeks later, when I turn up at, say Nice Airport, they always seem so terribly surprised?

Me, if I was running a car hire business, I’d arrange it so that when you step off your aeroplane and trot up to the desk, I’d have one of those slightly weird long envelopes waiting for you, with the keys inside. We’re talking 30 seconds of face-time, tops. What I wouldn’t do, I think, is send you to an office, make you wait for ten minutes while I piss about mysteriously with a computer, send you to another office, make you wait another half hour while I type an unfeasible amount really slowly, ask to see your passport again, photocopy it, ask to see your driver’s licence again, photocopy it, ask to see your credit card again, photocopy it, go out for a fag, come back, look surprised, send you out to a woebegone sun-baked car park half a mile away staffed only by a teenager who says ‘your car he ees not reddy’ before going away and bringing back several cars which aren’t your car, before finally bringing one that is, which he then parks 300 metres away from you, even though there’s a space right next to you and your suitcase is really, really big.

I’ve hired a lot of cars. That’s just the European system. In Britain it is much the same, but raining. In America they do the computer bit and then say, ‘Fine, grab a car’ and you have to sprint to it, in competition with everybody else, like in some old-fashioned Grand Prix. Nowhere do they just say ‘Yes, you’ve planned this and so have we, here are your keys, bye.’ Why not? Somebody must know.