It is Saturday and tomorrow I am supposed to be renting a car from National Car Rentals, picking it up on Sunday at a depot in West London. Realizing that I could not make it back in time next Friday I needed a time extension. So I phoned the company. Number unobtainable.

Eventually, after searching the internet, I was able, after a 15 minute wait, to speak to an employee of the company:
“Oh, that depot has been shut”.
“I booked this in February! You had my email address. It is on the booking confirmation. You should have told me. If I hadn’t have phoned you today I would have gone to the old pick-up venue tomorrow and there would be no one and nothing there. I wouldn’t have had a hope of renting a car and my elaborate holiday planning would be for nothing, not to mention annoyed hosts and wasted money. That’s disgraceful customer service”.
No apology.
“The business is now being conducted at another location”, he said, and gave me the wrong phone number for an alternative location. When I eventually spoke to someone else (who I found, again on the internet), wait time 8 minutes, I was told the new branch didn’t open on a Sunday! But I could pick up a car at Marble Arch on Sunday if I wanted to.

Now Marble Arch is within the congestion charge area of London, which means that if you enter it at the wrong time of day you get charged $18.40, and if you don’t pay you are fined over a hundred dollars. So on top of messing me around and stressing me out, this dis-functional company may additionally have increased the whole cost of the trip.

I can’t say for sure whether National Car Rentals pays any tax in the UK, but I would not be surprised if it were registered in some Bahamian atoll. Two of the four employees I spoke to had such bad English I had to get them to repeat several times (getting hard to find fluent English speakers). The “management” has probably been “trained” at a business school, which teaches buzzwords and how to avoid customer contact. And these are the highly paid people who own and run our politicians! But be fair – we have let them.