Thank God For Hertz

Squirmy finally made an appearance at the factory. He had alot to do apparently, but he found some time to come by the area and see how I was doing. I told him the company car situation was a real problem for me and I asked him to figure out a way to score me a ride. Other divisions had ferried company cars up here to the Spokane site but now they too were low on cars and couldn't spare anything more. It was a real dilemma. Squirmy thought about it for a little bit and decided to try working out a deal with our rental car company, Hertz. Corporate had chosen Hertz as the only rental car company we would deal with and as a result they cut us a break of some kind on rental cars. He thought he could get me a set of wheels through them for the duration I was going to be in Spokane but we would have to go back to the airport to talk to the Hertz people there.

After work that day Squirmy drove me back to the airport which was a long trip west from the plant. On the drive there he talked at me about golf and other shit I wasn't even remotely interested in. Each time he finished a sentence he'd laugh in that hiss like Mutley way. I was glad to get out of the car when we arrived at the airport. When we reached the Hertz desk Squirmy talked with the manager to try and work something out for me. Then he did what he does best- he squirmed them into a deal. The situation was that I could have a car but only for a month at a time.

Hertz had some rule about keeping the car any longer than a month and said it would need to be back for servicing. When I brought the car back in at the end of each month they would have a new rental car waiting for me. Cool. The price was steep though. It was going to cost the company about a thousand dollars a month. Ouch. I felt a little bad about that but at the same time I was happy I wouldn't have to be at the whim of Uni-Burn for car availability or have to suffer through the daily commute to work with him anymore. I could do my own thing now, whatever it was going to be I didn't know. I had been stir crazy in my apartment the past couple of weekends. I didn't want to call Uni-Burn up to use the car because I knew he'd want to tag along and that was a fate worse than death. So I just stayed home writing in my journal or using the typewriter I brought with me to write letters home. There usually wasn't much on television to watch. I dislike TV anyway.

The other thing about the Hertz car rental that was a huge advantage, was it had Washington plates. No one was gonna fuck with me. I've been hearing nothing but bad stuff from employees who either brought their own cars up from California or got stuck with a company car that had California plates. The locals here have been harassing our people with the CA plates by following them around and flipping them off, yelling shit at them when stopped at a red light, throwing shit at their cars, and in a few cases I've heard of Spokane dirtbags following the California people until they got to their destination and then confronting them in the parking lot of wherever they were at. Two of our guys here on the transfer are black and they've really been getting fucked with. Around here it's bad enough if you've got a California plate on your car, that's one strike against you. If your skin happens to be anything other than white, well that's a big old strike number two.

I won't have to worry about any of that crap now though. I'm a white boy in a brand new 1996 Ford Taurus with Washington plates. I'm gonna blend right in to the Twilight Zone city of Spokane...