People keep telling me that I'm an adult now, which means I occasionally have to resist the urge to stick my tongue out at them and run away. Because as I am repeatedly made aware of, being and adult is weird and scary, and contains many unwritten rules that apparently everyone except me is aware of.
The most recent example of this is the story of how the car rental place killed IKEA day. Today was supposed to be a magical day. Let me start at the beginning, it usually works best that way. As part of our pilgrimage back to Oregon, we had visited Powells bookstore, a magical place full of every cheap used book that ever was, is or could be. And thanks to Zach's parents we each had sizable gift cards. I'm really glad we packed an extra bag, otherwise I'm not sure how we would have managed to bring all of our new literary treasures back home with us. However, once we arrived in our tiny tiny apartment, we realized that getting the books back was not our only problem. Our bookcases were already stuffed to the gills; we had no place to put them.
Fortunately, Zach and I had been initiated into the ways of obtaining cheap furniture when we first moved out here, so Zach suggested we head out the IKEA to get a new bookshelf or two. (Ah the FLÄRKE, $20 bookshelf extraordinaire). I also had less practical visions of running around the store basking in the reasonably priced loveliness, mispronouncing fun swedish words and spending far too much $ on frivolous things like throw pillows, vases, drapes and other cheap, fun things that I was sure would turn our tiny studio into a sleekly designed paradise.
However, in order to save money so that we can afford things like IKEA day, Zach and I have no car in DC. Public transit works great for most things, but it cannot and willnot bring us to IKEA, not to mention bringing anything back with us would be a huge pain. And we could not go to IKEA and not bring anything back. So it became necessary for us to procure a car for the day.
We went about doing so quite intelligently. We examined the pros and cons of Zipcar, carefully analyzed the prices of various car rental places and the made a savvy reservation with Enterprise that even used our Costco discount. And so, maps to IKEA and car reservation in hand we trekked out the the rental place this morning (we did not savilly request to have them pick us up). It was a little bit of a bus ride and much more of a walk to the rental place, but we were excited for IKEA day, so it didn't really matter.
We finally get to the place, which was fairly hidden. Our reservation is there, everything looks good. The ask for a drivers licence and a credit card. So we hand them Zach's license and my credit card, since Zach only has a debit. Apparently this is less good. For some reason that they never understood the name on the license and on the credit card have to be the same. Because horrible things that I don't understand would happen if they had payment for the car in someone else's name. But we still have Zach's debit card, that should work, right? Yes! A debit card can work.... so long as you have a pay stub or a utility bill with your address on it. Because of course who leaves home without a pay stub and a utility bill? Needless to say, IKEA day died a horrible death. I know they have to prevent theft and crap like that, but so long as they have a valid credit card, I really don't understand the problem. I also don't understand why none of this info is nice and clear on the reservation page. Oh, because all real adults intuitively know things like this. Oh well, I'm still pissed about IKEA day being slaughtered and don't really care how logical their reasoning was.
Now I am sure that all real adults are sagely nodding their heads at this stupid policy, which somehow makes sense to them. I have one thing to say to them:
Adult world is stupid.
No comments:
Post a Comment