If you have recieved this link in an email or a comment on your bl0g, I thank you for coming to check this out; I’m trying to make this item as widely known as humanly possible. – Thanks.

I called and spoke with someone at Budget, as I’m simply livid that their reps would do this to anyone. Here’s the text of the message I was asked to forward to Budget regarding this issue, including the chain of events, the IP address of the offender, etc.

To be clear; I even stated that I found the terms when I went looking for them, and that oversight was mine; the abuse at the time, and since are a different issue. At least Jerry was nice on the phone.

I’ve just spoken with Jerry T. on the phone, and he has opened case #260151 regarding this issue. Something that is either indication of poor customer service or, possibly, the biggest coincidence I’ve ever seen in my life, and I felt the need to call to bring this to someone’s attention.

1) I was denied renting a car (that I had reserved for use in Calgary) by a rude Budget staff member, and that lead to me writing a story about it, and sending said story both to Hertz and Budget who were the companies involved.

Story: http://foo.ca/wp/2005/07/25/…

2) I recieve a response from “Elle W.” at 1:59 pm who states, in part, “Unfortunately, most rental car companies do require a driver’s license to rent since it is illegal to drive without one.” I considered this rather rude, and responded to the email as you’ll see below at 2:09pm local time.

3) I recieve a notice that someone has commented to my web log that I posted the above story to at 1:58pm local time

4) I noticed that the time stamp on the comment was at virtually the same time at the official email.

Comment: http://foo.ca/wp/2005/07/25/…

“Sounds like you are kinda silly if you thought you could rent a car without a driver’s license… renting a car usually involves driving a car and duh, you need a license for that!”

This comment was posted from a proxy server at http://www.cedant.com/ with the IP of 198.151.35.6

5) I’m not happy, and I am considering feeding this story to more traditional media at this time. My internet based followup is here:

http://foo.ca/wp/2005/07/26/…

I expect to recieve a call back on this issue in the next 24 hours, outlining what Budget is going to do.

Richard Murray
604-828-xxxx

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what to do, but I can’t let this drop; they know I’m not a paying customer. The only thing I’m sure that I want to do is let everyone I know hear about this… and maybe a million others as well.

Update: Just took a look at the web server logs just to see if it could all be a big coincidence, and see this entry from the proxy server, which was a direct link with no referring site, meaning that someone has likely just copied and pasted the URL into a browser window, or clicked on a link in the email I sent in.

There are no other hits on the article in question for approximately 6 hours before that, and that one was from a friend in the UK.

The time in question for this comment shows as 16:59 EASTERN, making it 1:59pm on my coast. The following line the loading of the comment form;

198.151.35.6 – - [26/Jul/2005:16:59:01 -0400] “POST /wp/wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.0″ 302 0 foo.ca “http://foo.ca/wp/2005/07/
25/rent-from-hertz-not-from-budget/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)” “-”

Then, at 17:44 (2:44pm local) another computer behind that same proxy IP hits the page, again linking directly. It’s not likely the same machine, as the content wasn’t cached on the client and was sent again.

At 17:48 (2:48pm local) the page was reloaded on a machine behind the proxy, but the client had it cached already, so no new data was sent.

At 17:50 (2:50pm local) another new machine behind the proxy loaded the page, but appears to have stopped. The page was reloaded at 17:51.

Well, it would appear that someone has read my most recent email, and that that proxy server is in fact the one behind which this Budget office is located; the timing is pretty good.