Fox Rent A Car's bureaucratic idiocy

The problem was that I wanted to use a debit card to pay for my car (I got rid of all my credit cards a few years back when I paid off the last of my debts). I rent cars all the time with a debit card and I'm used to rental agencies taking a small deposit (usually $250) on the card, or, in some extreme cases, requesting my Social Security Number and doing a credit check on me.

But Fox had a genuinely idiotic policy for debit-card payers: they needed a copy of my Southwest flight itinerary. It wasn't enough for me to show them the itinerary on my laptop's screen. They couldn't take it on a USB stick and print it themselves. I either had to take a taxi to a Kinko's and print it and come back or call Southwest and have them fax the itinerary to Fox.

An itinerary proves exactly nothing, of course. You can make any itinerary you want on your computer and print it off. Given that Fox got this reservation from Southwest, anything I printed for them was totally redundant. The clerk kept repeating that he needed "proof" that I was flying out of Oakland again. I offered to let him photograph my screen with his cameraphone, but for some reason, that isn't "proof," while going to a print-shop and screen-dumping to a printer would be.

I spoke to a supervisor (who told me that this was my fault for not noticing this bizarre requirement in the five screens' worth of fine print in their reservation "agreement"), called Fox corporate HQ and left a message, then turned around, walked up to the Hertz counter with my debit card and drove off in one of their cars five minutes later.