Hertz Marble Arch: DO NOT RENT FROM THEM!

I show up to pick up my car; as a Gold member it should be waiting for me, nicely warmed and with a small chocolate on the dashboard (not really).  I am greeted by an admittedly nice woman who should have been home in bed with her cold and not spraying germs on the customers and staff.  My car?  Nowhere to be seen.  We search.  For 20 minutes the agent and I wander in and out of rows of cars until we find the car I reserved, totally trapped in the dead centre of a hundred other vehicles.

Back at the desk I ask to add another driver.

"That will be £9 per day"

"I'm a Gold member, it's free."

"Not in the UK it's not."

10 minutes of arguing back and forth gets me nowhere.  The charge is added by the system and they can't wave it (like fuck they can't).

"Fine, forget it, just get me my car."

"It will take a bit of time..."

45 minutes later they manage to fish my car out and I go down to inspect it.  It's ancient (by rental standards) and covered with scratches.  I ask for another one.  No dice.  It's the last one of that type in stock.  Fine, upgrade me.  Certainly, that will be another £20 per day.

I just about lose it but they know I'm fucked.  What am I going to do?  I need this particular car (estate) to haul a bunch of furniture back from Devon and I know, as they do, that there is no where else I am going to get one three days before Christmas.

Defeated, I drive away.  Three miles later I wonder why it's still freezing in the cab.  After fiddling about with the dials and buttons I discover that the fan only works on full-blast.  Great.  I have a choice between blistering hot or freezing cold.  This is shaping up to be a fun holiday.

I have just finished sending Hertz a sternly worded letter but I know it will disappear down a rabbit hole.  All I can do now is tell as many people as humanly possible to avoid renting from Hertz in general and the Marble Arch branch in particular.

All Hertz needed to do was wave the second driver fee (like they say they do in their T&Cs) and they could have kept my good will and prevented me from slagging them on my blog, Twitter, Yelp and any other site I can find.  I'll tell my friends and family about how fucked up they are and pass the word to our corporate travel people.  At the end of the day, they didn't get my £45, won't get my normal six rentals a year from now on and maybe even lose a few more customers to boot.

As I told the drones behind the counter: you can't just treat people poorly and get away with it anymore, the Internet is a huge megaphone and if someone gets fucked over by a company, a pile of people are going to hear about it.  Or at least the three people who read this blog.

Not this time Amazon

I just finished all my on-line holiday shopping without giving a penny to Amazon; it wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.

Normally, 99% of all the cash I drop on gifts throughout the year goes to Amazon.  With friends and relatives dotted around the world, Amazon makes it easy for me to point-and-shoot presents wherever and whenever I need to send them.

Not this time.

With very little effort I managed to circumvent Amazon completely and still get all my December Pagan Holiday shopping done.  In fact, I enjoyed the diversity of my new Amazon-free lifestyle.

If you too are looking for a way to avoid free-speech stifling Amazon, check out these sites instead:

Support a truly worthy cause at Amnesty International UK


Amazingly cool stuff from the Museum of Modern Art in New York

Speaking of museums, The British Museum also has a good on-line selection

The perennial favorite of nerds everywhere: Think Geek

Great travel gear and of course, a great magazine: National Geographic

If you decide that everyone has too much stuff, throw a few bob to people who actually are saving lives:

St. Mungo's UK homeless services

Unparalleled bravery: Royal National Lifeboat Institution

IMHO one of the most worthy organizations ever created in the history of the human race:  Medecins Sans Frontiers

My point is, fuck Amazon, if they want to cave into government pressure then there is no reason that we need to send them any dosh ever again.

"If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment they should get out of the business of selling books."  -Julian Assange

Amen to that.

Hypocrisy Continues

Visa and MasterCard won't let you donate to WikiLeaks but donating to the KKK is still A-OK:

http://tinyurl.com/2682pu2

WikiLeaks Mirrors

The main site is getting hit by DoS attacks but can still be reached by IP:

http://213.251.145.96/

Currently there are over 1300 mirrors and they can be found here:

http://wikileaks.challet.eu/mirrors.html

Boycott Amazon NOW!

Hello Amazon?  Do you sell dictionaries?  Open one up and read me the definition of "irony".  Great.  Now find a copy of the US Constitution and take a look at the first amendment- it says something about freedom of the press and of speech right?  You guys are all for that aren't you?  I mean, if it weren't for the First Amendment you'd mostly be selling cat calendars and bibles.  You are pretty much the digital embodiment of the power of printed word so you'll excuse me when I say:

What the FUCK are you doing pulling WikiLeaks from your servers?!

Especially, I might add, since a corrupt old fuck like Joe Lieberman told you to?  Joe Fucking Lieberman?  The poster-boy for spineless self-interest and political pandering?  Are you fucking serious Amazon?  Give yourself a slap and grow a pair.

You people owe your very existence to the principles you are now denying.  You have caved to pressure from a government that got its ego bruised.  Would you pull Howl, The Catcher in the Rye or The Grapes of Wrath if some crooked Senator asked you to?  The government didn't like what those books said either and managed, with the complicit support of weak-willed sheep such as yourselves, to have them banned.

In light of your staggering act of political cowardice, let me just say that even though it is going to make my holiday shopping about 1000% more difficult, Amazon you will not be getting a single dollar or pound of my cash for the foreseeable future.

I know you don't give a shit- that's your problem.  You'll never notice that I didn't drop $250 on books and a new Kindle but the one or two people that read this blog will- as will my friends and their friends and my colleagues at work and so on.  Goodwill squandered is not easily replaced.

It is an exaggeration to say we have nothing to fear but fear itself, but correct to say that we have lots to fear from cowardice.
        - Brendan Keenan

Total so far

The Republican's are not even technically in control of Congress yet but they have already chalked up some impressive victories:

• Extending tax cuts to the super rich- all over but the shouting
• Raising the inheritance tax threshold to $5 million- all but done
• Keeping "Don't ask, don't tell" in place- check
• Block health care for 9/11 rescue workers- check
• Blocking a sensible path to citizenship for illegal immigrant students- check
• Killing the new arms control treaty- in progress
• Revoking or gutting (more so) health care reform- you betcha, stay tuned

Take my word for it, the US is doomed.  The next two years will be host to an unprecedented display of right-wing excess and insanity.  Obama will be a one-term President and his Tea-Party endorsed successor will preside over a cataclysmic shift toward an American Theocracy.

The US is an empire in decline, ruled by religious madmen, well armed and looking for a fight.  They have become their enemy not by coercion or force but by choice and willful ignorance.  Shouting and waving banners they walked happily into the flames.

To the Barricades

For the past 90 minutes a police helicopter has been hovering over our building, keeping an eye on the mass of protesters trying to push their way to Westminster: the campaign against raising student fees continues apace. 

I have to admit, as much as I like a good street protest, I haven't thrown my lot in with the students on this one.  The reason is quite a simple one and can be summed up like this, "fuck-'em, I had to pay for college, so can they."  Not very liberal of me I know but there you have it.

Thankfully my budding conservationism was quashed when I took the time to look back over the reality of my college years.

I entered college at 19 and when I walked out at 34 I was lumbered with $34,000 in student loan debt.  I had another $30,000 piled on my credit cards- most of which was accrued while I was in school and underemployed.  $64,000 in debt for a photography/art history major pretty much guarantees a lifetime of indentured servitude to Uncle Sam and Visa.

Luckily before I was forced into bankruptcy or faking my own death, I landed an IT job, discovered a stack of money in a college fund my parents had forgotten about and through an amazing loophole in US tax law, managed to get every penny of my withholding tax for 1999 returned to me.  Thus, within a year of moving to London I found myself completely debt free for the first time ever.

Woo hoo.

Without that perfect storm of a good job, found cash and a tax break there is no way I could have ever, ever, paid of those debts.  Far from paying my own way, I managed to land three huge Get Out of Debtors Prison Free cards and I hit them like a semi with no breaks.

Given these humbling revelations I've revisited my knee-jerk reaction to the UK student protests and come to the conclusion that a state sponsored free-ride for college is not in the best interests of the students or the country.

WTF?

Higher education should be subsidized, tuition should be kept under control and there should be need-based grants for those who can't afford the fees but I still feel that the students should contribute something to their education.  Even if that something is having to work in the school bookshop three days a week.  Let me explain.

My evil ex-girlfriend, the Norwegian, gets free education for life at nearly any school she chooses anywhere in the world.   This sounds great but the reality is that she developed an expectation of entitlement that has kept her gainfully unemployed and living the life of a perpetual student.  I don't know where she is now exactly, I'm hoping living in a cardboard box behind a strip-club, but I can tell you that in the 10 years we were in contact she had a grand total of one job that could pay her bills.  The rest of the time was spent in school accumulating degrees and boyfriends.

Am I bitter and jealous?  You bet.  Yet if I push aside the anger, I find even more anger.  Beneath that comes the same kind of self-righteous rage I hear spewing form the mouths of Torries when they talk about how hard they work to provide for their families while we give free houses to immigrants.

Somebody had to pay for my evil-ex to spend her life playing in the academic sandbox because fuck knows she didn't.  On top of that, she contributed not at all to anyone else's education because she was too busy leaching the system.  It wasn't  like her family was destitute: they owned three fucking Stradivarius violins for Christ's sake!

Granted, I shouldn't let the experiences of one spoiled child taint my world-view but unfortunately it does.  A university education should be available to anyone with the intellectual ability to pursue it but giving everyone a blank-cheque leads to complacency.  Means tested grants and loans coupled with tuition caps can keep higher education affordable to both those who are in the classroom and those in the work-force paying the bills.

No shame

Let me get this straight: Republicans are extending tax cuts to the rich (and "middle-class" people making $200K) and yet they are screaming about the deficit being too high?

They hold up jobless benefits for people who can't afford food for their kids so that their rich patrons can have another stack of cash?

Poor people spend the extra money you give them and rich people save it- which provides more short and mid-term stimulus to the economy?

Never could I have imagined that my disgust for the American Right would be greater than what I felt during the Bush years- how wrong I was.

If there is a hell, these people are going there.