drink up there? Do we know that, Gerry?’
As I pull into the airport poor Gerry’s taking a terrible drubbing from enraged listeners accusing him of blasphemy, congenital idiocy, and ignorance of the fact that the top of Croagh Patrick is under cloud ninety per cent of the time. Gerry’s morale goes into free fall, perhaps because work on the sacrilegious trench has already begun, and he’s thinking it might be quite hard now to go back and fill it in. Maybe he’s already bought the electric cable.
I park the repmobile in a potholed wasteland among dozens of its clones and head for the terminal.
Apart from once absent-mindedly eating a whole packet of stale crisps in the Dar es Salaam departure lounge before looking in the bottom of the bag for crumbs and discovering it was full of live ants, I can think of few travel experiences more depressing than returning a hire car to an airport dealership. The desk will be unmanned as you approach, because the partially trained company representative has seen you coming and hidden behind the counter in the hope that you’ll drop the keys in the box and go away. This way they can post you a pre-paid credit card slip, which is infinitely preferable to standing there watching your reactions as you read the bill.
After standing my ground for two or three minutes, a young man suddenly pops up from underneath the counter, feigning surprise. According to his label, his name is Ruaraigh; and he’s very red. Either he’s already embarrassed at the answers he’s about to give me, or he’s got someone down there with him.
‘Ah, hiya, heh, didn’t see you there just now. Looking for some fax paper. Can I help ya at all?’
Standard industry practice then prevails, as Ruaraigh denies all knowledge of my, or the repmobile’s, existence, and elaborately fails to find the paperwork.
‘Sorry about the delay there, Mr McCarthy.’
I’ve already done the mental sums on this one. Thirteen days, call it two weeks, at what was it? Twenty-two pounds ninety-live pence a day. Say £165 a week. Add on some tax, and there are always some insurance extras the bastards haven’t told you about, £380, say £400 tops, which still seems a lot for cheap seats, no central locking and pariah status, but there you go, that’s the world we live in.
‘Here it is now, Mr McCarthy. Sorry about the hold-up, like.’
But instead of a simple invoice saying ‘Car Two Weeks 400 quid’ the printer is pummelling out unfeasible columns of figures on, at the last count, three sheets of corporate paper. It’s taking on the look of the extras on a Keith Richards hotel bill. As the machine runs out of puff, Ruaraigh rips off the account, detaches the side perforation and glances at it, before passing it to me with a nervous grin.
‘Jeezus, Mary and Joseph, that can’t be right!’
The anguished howl comes from nearby, where a big woman in a state of shock, and inappropriate velour leisurewear, has just received her bill at the ironically-named Budget counter. I glance down at mine and feel physically sick.
‘Six hundred and thirty-two pounds?’
‘Yes, sir. Six hundred and thirty-two pounds thirty-four pence. But that’s punts remember, Mr McCarthy, sir.’
Everything’s turning woozy with the nausea. For a moment I can’t think straight. Punts? What’s he on about? Perhaps it’s rhyming slang and he’s talking about his bosses.
‘So, if you allow for the exchange rate, sir, that’s only…’
‘Six hundred and thirty-two pounds to hire a tiny bloody embarrassment of a car for two weeks? Why the hell is car hire so expensive in this country?’
‘Well, sir, it’s not two weeks, it’s only thirteen days.’
‘That’s right, so there should be at least a day to knock off then, shouldn’t there? This can’t be right.’
‘Well, sir, no, sir, because you got the first week at the weekly rate, which was, let’s see, ₤210 plus tax, but the second week isn’t a week at all now,
As I pull into the airport poor Gerry’s taking a terrible drubbing from enraged listeners accusing him of blasphemy, congenital idiocy, and ignorance of the fact that the top of Croagh Patrick is under cloud ninety per cent of the time. Gerry’s morale goes into free fall, perhaps because work on the sacrilegious trench has already begun, and he’s thinking it might be quite hard now to go back and fill it in. Maybe he’s already bought the electric cable.
I park the repmobile in a potholed wasteland among dozens of its clones and head for the terminal.
Apart from once absent-mindedly eating a whole packet of stale crisps in the Dar es Salaam departure lounge before looking in the bottom of the bag for crumbs and discovering it was full of live ants, I can think of few travel experiences more depressing than returning a hire car to an airport dealership. The desk will be unmanned as you approach, because the partially trained company representative has seen you coming and hidden behind the counter in the hope that you’ll drop the keys in the box and go away. This way they can post you a pre-paid credit card slip, which is infinitely preferable to standing there watching your reactions as you read the bill.
After standing my ground for two or three minutes, a young man suddenly pops up from underneath the counter, feigning surprise. According to his label, his name is Ruaraigh; and he’s very red. Either he’s already embarrassed at the answers he’s about to give me, or he’s got someone down there with him.
‘Ah, hiya, heh, didn’t see you there just now. Looking for some fax paper. Can I help ya at all?’
Standard industry practice then prevails, as Ruaraigh denies all knowledge of my, or the repmobile’s, existence, and elaborately fails to find the paperwork.
‘Sorry about the delay there, Mr McCarthy.’
I’ve already done the mental sums on this one. Thirteen days, call it two weeks, at what was it? Twenty-two pounds ninety-live pence a day. Say £165 a week. Add on some tax, and there are always some insurance extras the bastards haven’t told you about, £380, say £400 tops, which still seems a lot for cheap seats, no central locking and pariah status, but there you go, that’s the world we live in.
‘Here it is now, Mr McCarthy. Sorry about the hold-up, like.’
But instead of a simple invoice saying ‘Car Two Weeks 400 quid’ the printer is pummelling out unfeasible columns of figures on, at the last count, three sheets of corporate paper. It’s taking on the look of the extras on a Keith Richards hotel bill. As the machine runs out of puff, Ruaraigh rips off the account, detaches the side perforation and glances at it, before passing it to me with a nervous grin.
‘Jeezus, Mary and Joseph, that can’t be right!’
The anguished howl comes from nearby, where a big woman in a state of shock, and inappropriate velour leisurewear, has just received her bill at the ironically-named Budget counter. I glance down at mine and feel physically sick.
‘Six hundred and thirty-two pounds?’
‘Yes, sir. Six hundred and thirty-two pounds thirty-four pence. But that’s punts remember, Mr McCarthy, sir.’
Everything’s turning woozy with the nausea. For a moment I can’t think straight. Punts? What’s he on about? Perhaps it’s rhyming slang and he’s talking about his bosses.
‘So, if you allow for the exchange rate, sir, that’s only…’
‘Six hundred and thirty-two pounds to hire a tiny bloody embarrassment of a car for two weeks? Why the hell is car hire so expensive in this country?’
‘Well, sir, it’s not two weeks, it’s only thirteen days.’
‘That’s right, so there should be at least a day to knock off then, shouldn’t there? This can’t be right.’
‘Well, sir, no, sir, because you got the first week at the weekly rate, which was, let’s see, ₤210 plus tax, but the second week isn’t a week at all now,
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