Although I retired last year as a judge of the Superior Court of California, our chief justice appointed me to sit and hear cases on assignment anywhere in the state to help clear out the backlog, so on occasion I rise to the call of duty. Last Friday I finished a two-week criminal court assignment at a Southern California courthouse.
On the night before my last full day of the assignment, I parked my mid-sized four-door economy rental car in my hotel's outdoor parking lot. I rose at 4:30 am the next morning to go to the gym, since this early hour would give me time to work out, return to the hotel, shower and shave, grab breakfast, stop at a nearby coffee shop, and take a leisurely drive to court.
Standing outside in the hotel's dark parking lot, wearing only sweatpants and a T shirt to protect me from the 40-something degree cold, I hurried to enter the car and turn on the heater. Despite repeated attempts, the car fob on the key ring wouldn't function: the doors wouldn't unlock, the lights wouldn't turn on, and the trunk wouldn't open. I used the manual key to get the driver's door open, but nothing worked once inside the cabin: no interior lights, no signals, etc. The car had become a two-ton brick.
I went back to my room, dug through the paperwork, and then called my car rental company's roadside service. After an interminable period of responding to a recorded voice directing that "If you are calling about X, press 1, if you are calling about Y, press 2…" a human came on the line. Before talking to me about my problem, she needed my name, location, and contract number. She then needed my assurance that I was in a safe location. ("Lady, I'm in my hotel bedroom. When I was a bartender on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood in the 1970's, there would be nothing safe about this room at 4:30 am, but those days are long gone.") She then asked if my cell number was a good one to use if we became disconnected and she needed to call me back. I assured her that it was. Now we got down to business. After explaining my predicament and answering a bevy of questions, we were disconnected. I waited. She never called me back.
I started from the beginning. After going through the X and Y automated routine again, and another wasted 15 minutes, a different lady came on the line. Once again, I explained the dilemma of the non-functioning rental car key fob. She went through the same canned checklist of questions (and required the same assurance of my personal safety) before opining that the key fob must have a dead battery, because the car won't function if the key fob battery is dead. She said that she would send a roadside assistance tow truck with a fresh fob battery, and that said truck (we never really talk like that in court despite what you have learned from watching lawyer movies) would arrive in about 15 minutes.
Said truck did arrive in 15 minutes—plus an extra hour. The driver pulled up not in a tow truck, but in an SUV. "So," he said as he approached carrying two long cables, "I hear your car battery needs a jump."
"Uh, no—I need a battery for the key fob."
"Hmmm," he told me while scratching his chin. "We don't service key fob batteries. We give car battery jumps to start the engine. We also open car doors with a slim jim if you're locked out. Are you locked out?"
"No."
"Then why did they call me?"
Despite this mismatch, he wanted to be helpful. "Would you like me to give you a ride to the battery store?" he asked. "I won't charge you for the ride. People usually just tip me for doing them the favor." Since he asked, I assumed that there was such a thing as a nearby dedicated "key fob battery store," although I have never seen one in 67 years.
"That would be fine," I replied. "It's now 6:15 am. Do you know any key fob battery stores open now?"
"No, come to think of it, I don't. Anyway, good luck—and have a nice day."
Once again back in my hotel room, I put in my third call to the rental company. After getting beyond their now-familiar preliminary questions firewall, their system connected me to someone who spoke hard-to-understand English with a thick but undefined accent, and who, after another ten frustrating minutes of previously asked questions and non-helpful answers, refused my demand to speak with a supervisor. It was either talk to him or talk to nobody.
I talked to him.
After our unpleasantries subsided, he told me that the company's roadside service trucks don't carry key fob batteries—a deduction that I had already made without his assistance. He then asked why I thought a tow service driver might show up with a fob battery when everyone knows that they don't carry them. No matter—he said that my rental car needed to be towed. He would send a tow truck, but I needed to wait at the location for the truck to arrive so that I could give the driver the non-functioning fob and key. Afte that occurred, he instructed me to use the link he had just texted me, which would connect me with the rental company's approved Uber driver, who would pick me up and bring me to the nearest rental office for a replacement car—at the airport 20 miles away (40 miles round trip back to where I needed to be, and in horrific Southern California morning commute traffic). I told him that this plan was unacceptable. I didn't have time to drive back and forth to the airport: I needed to get to work.
"Well, the airport is the closest office. Oh, and there will be a $69 charge for the tow truck showing up. You don't object to that, do you?"
This question lit the fuse, and it reached the powder keg immediately. I exploded with a string of expletives that would have made my longshoreman grandfather proud of the vocabulary skills I picked up from him. "Well," he told me, "you can dispute it if you want, but I've already charged you that amount for the tow truck. Thank you for your patronage."
Click.
I waited another hour for the no-show tow truck. Finally, as 8 am approached, I tossed the fob onto the car's front seat, texted the AWOL tow truck driver and told him where to find both, and I let him know that he and the rental car were officially on their own.
I clicked the rental company's earlier sent link to order their pre-approved Uber driver, which apparently needed to be dispatched through the rental car company's web portal. A few minutes later, I received a confirmation email—from the rental car company, and not the Uber driver—that an Uber driver would contact me shortly. Fifteen more minutes elapsed without any Uber contact. With a full court calendar set to begin at 9 am, and the clock ticking, I took matters into my own hands.
I ordered my own driver from the Lyft app. Seven minutes later, he showed up and drove me to a competing rental car company, which was a mere 1.8 miles away. It was amazing how much my jolly Lyft driver told me about his bachelor sex life in that brief 1.8-mile drive. He was so accomplished as a storyteller that, had I not been nearly late for court, I would have told him to skip the competing rental agency and just take me to the airport office.
A few minutes later, I arrived at the competing rental company. A nice young man behind the counter listened as I recounted my entire plight. "Gee, I don't know why they told you that you needed to go all the way to the airport to pick up a car," he exclaimed. "We are all part of the same company! They merged with us not long ago. I used to work for them." He typed my name and phone number into his computer, and poof! There was my rental contract with the original company. After a few keystroke entries, he handed me the magic fob to a 2025 Ford Mustang convertible with leather interior and all the hottest bells and whistles. "I hope this makes up for your troubles," he told me with a smile.
"That's really nice of you," I said, "but do you have something tamer, like a station wagon or a Ford Pinto? Maybe a Yugo?"
"I'm curious," he asked. "Why would anybody turn down this baby for an economy car?" I told him that if this were 45 years ago, I was confident that I could have put this convertible to legendary 24-hour use. Now, at my age, I feared that if I drove around in it, every 22-year-old young woman who pulled alongside me would think, "Look at the old geezer trying to recapture his youth. He probably divorced his wife, cashed out his 401(k), bought this sports car, and got himself a hair plug transplant with the leftover settlement funds. Eww…."
"Sorry," he said. "I wanted you to think that I was doing you a favor by giving you this car. It's the only car I have available on the lot."
And so, for the remaining 24 hours of my business trip, I tooled around Southern California in a spiffy convertible sports car. It all went to waste on me. I dared not drive by the local college for fear that the co-eds (I suspect that term fell out of use in the 1960s; I use it now only to show my age suitability for the aforementioned Yugo) would ostracize me socially.
Can you believe that, with all this, I still took the bench only four minutes before the court's designated start time? And, whenever I asked for their input, our young courtroom clerks all complimented me on how natural my new clumps of hair plugs looked.
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