Escobar and his Toothless Beauty

While working at the rental counter you get the opportunity to "meet" some very special people. Some good, and some not so good. For instance today, one of our customers had a pizza delivered to us a mere hour or two after picking up his rental car, for no other reason than to say thanks, he didn't receive any special treatment (although we treat every renter special), he didn't receive a free upgrade, he was just so impressed with how well we did our job that he thought it was necessary to say thank you. We love customers like that.  The ones we don't love are the ones that trash our cars and use them for questionably legal reasons.

Before I get ahead of myself I should mention that in my area, with enterprise there is really no such thing as unlimited mileage other than in special circumstances or for corporate accounts that have that option in their agreements.  The downtown office has a set mileage limit of 200 miles per day for free with a $0.25 per mile charge after that, out at the airport it is set at 150 miles per day, and a $0.19 per over mile charge.  Occasionally  (like during the holiday season) we will offer special packages where unlimited miles are included in our full coverage protection, so that we can provide what we call a "worry free" package. That being said, there are some limitations to the "worry free" package, the main one being you cannot leave Montana with our vehicle.

Okay, now that I have established some of the back-story, I'll get on with the real story - Escobar and his Toothless Beauty of a Girlfriend.

I was working away doing my thing at the Downtown office when the phone rang, I grabbed it and was presented with a very pleasant raspy and demanding voice telling me they needed a car, with unlimited mileage to go visit family in the eastern part of the state. I explained our mileage limitations to them and she said they absolutely had to have unlimited mileage because where they were going is 2000miles away (the furthest you can go without leaving the state is 800 miles away in a town called Westby).  I told her that if they didn't leave the state they could have unlimited mileage with our "worry free" package. She said they might have to go into North Dakota cause that's where the nearest stores were. Fine - it's the holiday season, we'll make an exception. I guess they had rented once before with us, before I started working there, and brought back the car absolutely trashed.  This time, the only car we had to give them happened to have expired plates, we weren't aware of this until they brought the vehicle back -trashed as per the last time.  In order to not ramble on too much I'll sum up the whole rental.  They apparently got pulled over twice or three times because of this fact, the police searched the entire car twice, impounded it once and apparently broke the windshield while it was impounded, yet they were never issued a ticket or even a warning.  The apparent reason for the searches of the vehicle were because, according to the cop, they were on a known drug trafficking route-shocking.  Even with the vehicle being impounded for a day, they still managed to drive over 3500 miles in 4 days time (without leaving Montana or North Dakota of course).  While normally damage to the windshield would have been covered under our protection package this time it was not because any intentional damage to the vehicle voids our policy.  Oh, I almost forgot, Escobar, doesn't have a valid driver's license and his toothless beauty doesn't have a credit card in her name (again we made and exception to our policy for this).  We did get him to pay for the windshield without much of a fight and after that was settled, I figured I would never have the pleasure of seeing them again. I was wrong.

Friday night, last week, I'm working the closing shift at the airport so that I could take the weekend off to go see a high school buddy of mine get married - yes I went more to witness this feat more than anything.  It was a slow night so I was sitting at the counter staring off into the distance when someone caught my eye. I was none other than Escobar and his girl.  Thankfully they weren't here to see me, they went to the counter right next to me. While yes, all car rental companies are competitors, we still do a little looking out for each other. Fortunately in this case I didn't have to alert my competitor to the issues as Escobar and his girl conveniently disqualified themselves for a rental.  Of course they move over to my counter and demand a car, with all the previously mentioned requirements. Two things were great about this interaction, one, they didn't recognize me from the downtown office, and two the mileage limitations out at the airport are stricter than the ones at the downtown location. So I got to politely say no, and send them on their way down the row in search of their next drug running vehicle