Yesh Matsav

This week Michal and I took an amazing trip to the Negev. We will write more about this soon, but I thought I’d share a short anecdote about the process of renting our car for the journey.

We booked a car online with El Dan, one of the major car rental chains in Israel. When we arrived at the rental agency, a young woman with about zero sense of humor assisted us with the reservation. Let’s call her Tzipi. During our brief discussion about the reservation details, I thought I had made clear to Tzipi that I wanted only the basic insurance on our basic little car. She generated the paperwork, I signed, and we were out the door. We walked to a nearby place for a pre-journey bite, but as we walked back to get the car, I looked again at the contract and noticed that there was a strange $60 surcharge for the “extra special insurance” (called an excess damage waiver) whereby you can return your car as a piece of scrap metal (or have your next of kin do so) and have no obligation at all to the rental company. I had never asked for this, however, as I was happy to take my chances with the $500 standard deductible. So as Michal stayed in the car outside, I went in to tell them that they had made a mistake. I looked for Tzipi, the humorless rental agent, but she had already left, so I spoke to another agent. We’ll call him Itzi.

“Excuse me, but there is an error here.” I explained. “Your colleague charged me for the excess damage waiver by mistake.”

“I am sorry, but there is nothing I can do. The contract is already signed,” Itzi stated.

“But I never asked for the excess damage waiver,” I parried. “And she never told me anything about it.”

“There is no way I can do anything about it, and Tzipi has already left. But I can do you a favor – I’ll be generous and deduct the $8 for the additional driver,” referring to Michal.

“Come on, you can do better than that. This is outrageous. I’m really angry – the other agent never said anything about this.”

“Sorry.”

Huffing and very pissed off, I returned to the car where Michal was waiting for me, and I told her the story and that we were screwed. Michal, however, would have none of it. “Come on!!” she said as she grabbed the contract out of my hands, storming back into the office with me trailing behind her.

“Who did you talk to?” Michal asked me.

“Him” I said, sheepishly pointing to Itzi, feeling like I was a little boy telling my mommy who hit me in the playground.

A barrage of loudly and rapidly expressed Hebrew well beyond my Ulpan Gordon level א then ensued, and within a rather short time span, we were directed to another agent who was instructed to draw up a new contract without the excess damage waiver. We’ll call him Shmulik. Her task completed, Michal retreated to a bench while I was waiting to sign the new papers. But having me all to himself, Shmulik thought he would give it a last go.

“But why you are not taking the excess damage waiver?” he asked.

“Because I don’t want it and it’s not worth the money.”

“Do you know Israel?” Shmulik rhetorically asked. “Do you know how many accidents happen here everyday? This is not like America. Let me show you,” as he proceeded to pull out a fistful of forms that ostensibly indicated all the car damage that the poor foreign car renters at El Dan had suffered while innocently driving the speed limit and naively obeying the traffic rules. “Driving here is dangerous. People here are aggressive. I think it’s because of the Arabs. But this is another story.”

For a second, I must admit, I did stop to reconsider, trying to weigh my chances that a mad Arab driver, or an Israeli driver driven to madness by an Arab, would ram into my car and turn it into a steaming piece of scrap metal for which I would be liable (at least for the $500 deductible). But fortunately cooler heads prevailed. We exited the El Dan and  began our journey to the Negev – with an extra $60 of humus money for the road.