I was over in the states a couple of weeks ago, first in Boston and then on to Silicon Valley. A few hours into the flight out to Boston I realised that, stupidly, I didn’t have my driving licence with me. Yes, I know, that was really dumb. (To any Americans reading, I’d like to point out that in the UK we don’t have to carry our driving licences with us at all times, so this is marginally…actually, I’ll stop trying to make feeble excuses). However, as I was going to Boston first, I told myself, this wasn’t too much of a problem. I could get by without a rental car there as long as I had the licence by the time I got to California.
I asked Lisa, our office manager (someone you can always rely on to sort out any type of apparently insurmountable problem), to pick up my licence from home and send it by courier to my hotel in Boston. The licence left the UK on a Monday morning for a ‘guaranteed’ Tuesday morning 9am delivery in Boston. A priority service for which we were charged the princely sum of $200.
Needless to say, Tuesday morning came and went and there was no sign of my licence. By the time I left Boston at 6am on Wednesday morning, it still hadn’t arrived. So Lisa, resourceful as ever, arranged for its delivery to be re-routed to San Francisco airport, the idea being a perfectly synchronised arrival with me and my licence being reunited in front of the car rental desk. Obviously, this didn’t work out either.
This gave me a major problem. Clearly, you can’t exist in Silicon Valley without a car, particularly not when you’ve got four solid days of meetings all with different companies spread around the valley. So, there I am at the car rental desk with only a fax copy of my licence and no sign of the original. And you can’t rent a car without a driving licence - or at least that’s what I thought until the person behind the counter whispered, “Don’t worry, I know someone who can help you. Go and stand over there by the wall.”
A couple of minutes later, a chap turns up and ushers me downstairs to his car. We drive a couple of miles away from the airport where he proceeds to rent me a car for the princely sum of $60 per day (minimum rental period 5 days, a nice touch). The car in question (there was no picking out your favourite model here) was a beat-up Toyota Corolla with 100,000 miles on the clock, complete with missing hubcaps, cigarette burns and a dodgy exhaust. No marking the position of any scratches and dents on an outline drawing of the car here - my man simply takes an imprint of my credit card, gives me the keys, and then away I go. Slowly.
But I wasn’t exactly in a position to complain. And to be fair it did the job and got me to all my meetings on time. Funny thing was, having eventually received my licence on the Friday morning, I was stopped by a traffic cop in the afternoon for not turning left when in a turn left lane while getting lost trying to follow some Mapquest directions to my next meeting. Believe me, I’ve never been happier to produce my driving licence...
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