Today I am posting from the air as I make my way back to the east coast to rejoin the world of work and 2013. Look at me! I'm on a plane! So high tech!
It’s been an awesome vacation, but I suppose I have to start returning people’s voicemails and emails at some point, right?
I think I forgot to mention, at one point during the vacation, I had to rent a car for like, three hours, and so I (being my money-conscious self) opted for the cheapest, more fuel efficient vehicle in the entire Hertz fleet. Although it was laughably tiny, this car did not make me embarrassed to be alive, as it wasn’t a totally weird color (it was beige). Have you noticed they’ve started making rental cars in a beige color so non-descript, the cars are almost invisible? We call this “serial killer beige,” because this is the type of non-descript beige car that a serial killer would totally use, just because no one would ever be able to remember if they had seen the car or not. Every single one of these beige cars seems to have an extra-roomy trunk in which you could totally hide a body or two. Coincidence? I think not.
At any rate, when we went to refuel the car before returning it (because I am cheap, did I mention?), we were faced with a simply baffling conundrum: neither of us had ANY CLUE how to open the fuel tank door. It didn’t open when we pushed on it, there was no release switch anywhere to be found on or near the driver's side floor, and, to our knowledge, there is no “standard” way to open something like that, is there? This had us stumped into silence, which is quite a thing.
I don’t know if you’ve run into many of these situations in your life, but something like this can really get under your skin and can quickly become absurd and kind of funny. How could two adults, both college graduates, both licensed drivers for 25+ years (each) be completely unable to figure out how to open that little door to put gas in a car? I will not lie—at one point, I got so frustrated, I almost stuck my keys in there and pried the door open, just on principle., to show it that I was the boss of it Let’s get this thing clear—I’m not like, a shut-in who hasn’t driven cars or anything. In fact, in my adult life, I have traveled (for business and recreationally) a fair amount, and have eve rented cars in foreign countries and put gas in them. My father is a car enthusiast. I like to think I have driven MORE cars than the average person, and yet, I have NEVER ONCE not been able to figure out how to open up the gas pump thing.
Seriously—WTF? Are they making cheap cars differently now? Were Stephan and I both losing our minds at the very same time?
We pondered this for along while, and I am not even joking, we went into the glove compartment to look at a schematic of the car in the owner's manual, only to discover that the switch was in the world’s most unintuitive place (hidden underneath the dashboard, like where they would ordinarily put the lever for the hood). I almost want to call up Hertz and give them the feedback that two grown-ass adults had to pull out the owner’s manual in order to refuel this car, but at the same time, the car was a make/ model that I would classify as the “Serial Killer Beige Toyota ‘Forgettable,’ so I don’t know that this type of usability feedback would even be of interest to the makers of this model.
Seriously though—have you ever had one of those moments, where even though you’re a total adult with many years of experience with doing things, you find yourself completely stumped as to what to do? This is one of those things that actually doesn’t happen that much in an adult’s life, so I think it’s worth pointing out when it does, because it’s kind of funny and makes you feel child-like for a second. Remember when you felt like that about everything, like the whole world was one big missing fuel pump switch?
