Yet another Repo Story

Ya'll tell me if these get boring.
(actually, so far, I've only received good responses on the repo stories).

Setting: Spring 2001. I was assistant manager at the Enterprise on Mendenhall (same as in the last story I posted - this was a few weeks later). This time we had a claimant (other person was at fault) who had been paid for her car as it had been a total loss. Renter kept the car past the last day. The insurance company told us about the last day, only seven days later (jerks!).

The usual couple of days passed with the renter avoiding our attempts to contact her. Please note - not all folks do this, but people who get the rental car repo'd sure do avoid calls like the plague!

I get a copy of the key. That was easy as this renter was the first person to rent this car. It was a brand new Chevy Metro. She got it with 2 miles on the odometer. We still had the spare key for this car in the drawer. My manager, Jeremy and I did some tracing and found where she worked and what shift.

That night - around 7 pm - it was still dark as we pulled into the parking lot of the call center the renter worked for. We saw the metro. Sure enough, she had wrecked the brand new car! There were significant dents on the rear bumper. But that was not all we saw.

Packed into this subcompact car was every belonging she and her infant had managed to acquire over the course of her life. Yes, it looked as though she had moved into the car.

New key, engine starts, and away we go. Repo finished. This is where things get interesting.

Note - many personal items get left in rental cars accidentally during normal rentals, as well as things are often in rental cars when repo's are necessary. It was the policy of Enterprise that employees document the belongings removed from a rental car to make it easy for the renter to come back and let us return their possessions to them. We were forbidden by law to hold possessions in lieu of payment owed on the rental.

This renter had the longest documentation I have ever seen. There were thousands of objects to document. It took me and my manager working together for over four hours to log everything.

Another note - this Enterprise location shared the building with Enterprise corporate offices for West Tennessee, as well as Enterprise Remarketing and Car Sales for West TN at that time. In short, there were twenty some-odd other Enterprise employees just down the hall.

You know, we just had to show them the piles of bags we filled with the renter's belongings.

My area and city managers both commented in their six and ten years with the company, respectively, they had never seen so much stuff come out of one rental car. Much less a tiny little Metro.

Then, right there in front of the girls that worked in loss control (handling damage claims on rental cars), we see a box labeled "PRIVATE"

You know what we had to do.

My manager, Jeremy, opened it.

We shouldn't have. It had been most certainly labeled appropriately.

People, I am no expert in the areas of erotic toys, but I got through lessons 1 - 87 that very moment. Holy cow, did that girl like her "toys."

Several of the others ran back into the building to get more co-workers. This had to be witnessed by all!

Moments later, the thirty or so of us, tired of seeing these... devices... decided to close the box back up, put rubber bands around it, and catalog it all as a single item.

I go back inside and at least a half dozen of the various employees are on phones to workers at other Enterprise locations. The conversations all started with the phrase: "You are not going to believe this!"

Two weeks later, when the renter came to retrieve her personal belongings, I found it hard not to laugh in her face. I did however, make sure to tell the other employees in the other parts of the building that "she" was there. No other prompting was needed. A crowd gathered.

The renter pulled me aside as I explained the crowd as a bunch of employees preparing to go to a meeting. She asked me if I had found... "a box..."

"I saw one labeled private and made sure to bind it up and away from prying eyes," I lied. I made sure to show it to her as we loaded her new SUV full of the stuff she had left in that poor little rental car.

It had taken me twenty minutes to load all of the bags up into her new vehicle.

But now I had a story to tell my kids... when they grow up, that is!