A few weeks back, while on vacation in Florida, a situation happened that if it had been at any other place in my life, I would’ve lost my cookies.
After we had picked up our rental car from Hertz, as we were leaving Orlando International Airport, an alarm went off on our dash that the tire was low on air. We had just picked the car up and so I thought the sensor had not had chance to reset, since I knew that the car rental people would have a checklist that they go through before they reassign a car.So we proceeded down through South Florida for a couple of hours and finally wound up at our destination, the one that we have been planning for months, Disney’s Vero Beach Resort (if you ever get a chance to go here, I strongly, strongly suggest you do).
We parked the car in an underground garage, right underneath the Resort, a very cool addition I might say, and went upstairs, checked into our room and didn’t give a second thought to the car. It wasn’t until the fourth day when we decided to take the car and do some local sightseeing that we discovered a problem.
You see, what had been a “faulty sensor“ actually turned out to be a slow leak in the tire!
Now, the first thing that I did was I reacted the same way that I would’ve reacted had I’ve been in Wisconsin. I was mad, I was frustrated, and I felt cheated. I swore up and down that the car rental Business was out to get us, that the persons that had rented the car before us had just passed on a problem to us, I saw the conspiracy!
I went upstairs to our room explained to Shannon what had happened, she made some phone calls, and within the hour a tow truck had been dispatched to our location to remove the tire and put the doughnut ring on. I won’t go through the entire drama of dealing with car rental businesses, it is a long and tedious process where there is no real face of the company, just a voice on the other end of the line and it is a numbers game instead of Customer Service, but suffice to say, it did get taken care of. And in the process, I got a chance to spend a couple minutes with the young lady that worked at our resort at the front gate security, then I got a chance to talk to the young gentleman that came and replaced a doughnut on a rental car in an underground parking garage that was poorly lit in a confined space, and he did it with a smile because “at least he was out out of the sun.”
After all was said and done, I went upstairs to vent into my sketchbook and draw all the nastiness that corporate USA, small town businesses, and the world had for us because we were on vacation and the world was not!
It was then that it occurred to me. That’s right! I am on vacation! I am still on vacation! Nothing had changed! And that made me look at what actually happened over the last hour. On a quiet day, I managed to go do a check on a car that I would’ve normally been running out the door to work for but, today I was not. I got a chance to speak to a fellow security officer and a resort across the country and found out that their struggles were the same as our struggles in Minnesota and we both had a good laugh at it. I got a chance to speak to an emergency tow truck driver who counted his blessings while doing grunt work in a confined space and finally, I got to meet a older, Hispanic gentleman who ran a emergency tire repair Business out of the back of a U-Haul because it was for mobile emergency response service. We met up with him in a storage locker parking lot, and when he opened the door to the back of this box cube truck. It looked like an entire mechanic shop, self-contained. The 17-year-old in me was in awe of it all. All of which I almost missed because I had the wrong point of view. All of this with my best friend, my beautiful “girlfriend” sitting there right by my side.
Later that day as I sat there across the table from Shannon with my head full of thoughts and my sketchbook’s blank empty pages looking back at me, I had come to a powerful rationalization…
…a flat tire in paradise is better than a full tire at home.
Enjoy your day today and go make YOUR mark!
