Cracking Up, When I Could Have Just Cracked. Car Rentals and A Surprise In The Back Seat.

I've been driving a rental this week while Kermit is getting its ice-created indentation repaired (by the way, the color of my Subaru is called "Hulk"). Insurance covers 80% car rental at Hertz so I was put into a Kia Soul - the vehicle the hamsters drive during Super Bowl commercials. Although I never liked the first renditions of the car, the 2015 version is rather sharp. And, I admit, it drives rather awesome. The interior is slick and it handles I-95 very well.

When I got the car, they said I was the second driver, as the previous rental came in from New Jersey. The backseats were down and yesterday, when I lifted the seats to put in my computer bag, I realized they didn't thoroughly clean after the last customer. No, it's not a severed body part like car rental places sometimes found, but the target practice left behind did alarm me a bit. The writer in me was like, "Hmmm. Who had this car before me? Were they at a Target range before some malign murder? Have I been watching too much Empire and Scandal?"

But then I got to thinking about how inappropriate it is to find such an artifact in a car rental and thought about the fact that I could be a PTSD individual and/or had some extreme political view of guns in America. Violence in our nation is absurd, and so finding such a bullet-print in a car rental is a bit disturbing. I'm trying to figure out how to handle this with Hertz. It is poor customer relations on their part.

What if I took it as a threat? Why was the target practice taped to the cushions of the back seat? How did the Hertz agents miss this when cleaning the vehicle after the last customer? Should I return it so they can send it back to the previous renter?

I'm not sure if I was cracking up thinking about it or I was cracking apart in paranoia. Ten bullet holes. Nice way to start out the morning, especially in the chaotic sprint to finish a semester.