New car?

Nope, a rental:














And isn't it an awesome color? I like red or black cars.

It's my grandparents' rental car...Enterprise didn't have any cars in the size they requested so they got a free upgrade to that. It's a Ford Explorer...which is good, they have a Mercury so at least the controls aren't too different on this Ford.

They decided they needed to rent a car for the weekend so that they could go to church while their car is still in the shop. So yesterday Dad and I took them over to pick up the car. We all five walk into the rental office (Dad, me, Colin, G&G) and the girl working there looks a bit overwhelmed. Well, I think her worst fear were realized as G&G rented their car. :D

The first thing that goes wrong is that Grandma gives the girl their cellphone number as the secondary contact number, while Grandpa stares at Grandma because he was going to put down our number, and Dad stares at her, because she's giving the girl some number he's never heard of. "What number was that?" he says.
"That's our cellphone number," says Grandma.
"That's not the one I have," he says looking at his cellphone, "that must be the old number."
"No. You must have the old number!" insists Grandma, as her purse starts ringing and she looks terribly confused as to why her phone is ringing.
"No, that's the new one," says Dad.
"Oh! Well! Really?" she asks.

Meanwhile the girl is trying to get the paperwork dealt with and Grandpa is muddling through it while all this is going on. So they get that all dealt with and the girl goes and pulls the car around and starts going over the details with them. She's standing there telling them what they signed up for and when they need to bring it back, and the whole time after she tells them something, she keeps looking over at Dad, like, "Are you getting this? Because they're not listening to me." Because he was obviously the only person who knew what he was doing! :p I think Dad needs a T-shirt that says something like: "These are my in-laws, I'm doing the best I can!"

They finally got it all taken care of and were getting ready to go. Well, they couldn't figure out how to adjust the side mirrors, so I went to help them...turns out I couldn't figure it out either, so Dad had to come look at it. It made sense after he figured it out, but it was a little different. Our car has a separate switch to choose which side you're adjusting and then a button for the actually adjustment. This was all one knob and it had to be turned, and then tilted to change the mirrors.

Dad decided he better wait until they were off before he left, so we sat in the car and waited. And waited. And watched much discussion going on in their car.
Finally Dad went over to see what the problem was now...they couldn't figure out how to take the parking brake off. After that they were able to get going, and the only other thing was that Grandma came over later to have me check the key-less remote and see if it would work. It didn't, it needs a battery, but we all decided that was best anyway. They can just use the key and not be accidentally unlocking the car!

So, that was the excitement for yesterday! ;p

Oh, and they also started updating Dad on how Grandma's brother who has been in the hospital, is doing. Uh, we're standing in the middle of a car rental office, do you really think everyone else in here wants to hear about all this?

Of course, there was also another old couple in there. Dad said that when the man at Enterprise said, "I'll be with you in a minute" the lady leans over to her husband and asks very loudly "What'd he say?!!" So maybe they have a lot of older customers in there. Or at least on weekends they do.