DEFINITELY a rental

Yes I have been gone a while, but great work takes time my loved ones. While magazines have editors, sub editors, fashion police, writers and all that jazz, I run this joint by myself. I am a busy man, believe it or not. I have just finished a little piece on Claremont Main Road, and am just waiting for permission to use some photos from various websites dedicated to these apartments. So here is my newest piece…enjoy. While I suppose I should not recommend this to my readers, I think it is still worth a mention. It’s the art of gently abusing what is not yours.

The whole trend started a couple of years back when I knew some people working for a production company and I used to see them driving around in rental cars like Mercedes Sprinters and the like. Then one day I decided to go for a drive around in the car and realised that it was in pretty bad shape. Pieces of panelling were falling off and the cars gearbox was sounding a little rough. I also heard stories of abuse happening with these cars such as driving on dirt roads not meant for these cars abilities.

I always wondered why people treated rental stuff so badly. And that’s when one of the drivers introduced me to the phrase:

“Don’t be gentle, it’s a rental!”

And at other times these drivers were also heard to say “What’s the difference between a rental and a four by four?”

“What?” Is what you should naturally ask.

“A rental is a REAL four by four!”

And ever since then I have had this urge to rent stuff and just abuse it. I’m still quite keen on hiring a car, then taking out the maximum insurance and then taking it on a destruction derby trip up to Hermanus and literally hitting every single street pole on the way up there. Maybe even on the way back ramp it off Sir Lowrys pass. You know…just go completely crazy! Take it for a bit of Colin McRae rally action through some vineyards on the way.

But due to the fact that SLXS is the home of excess, you also want to give the car back to the rental company in style. I have devised a plan in my head that is so outrageous that it tends to have amusing results. What I would do is go past the rental place early on the morning that I need to deliver the car. I mean really early. Like 5am. You will find out why now. You then drive around the corner and walk back to the front of the agency, with a couple of 5 litre bottles of cooking oil and spill oil in the road to make it nice and slippery. Get it slippery like an ice rink, to prepare for the delivery of the rental. You need to take this abuse to the absolute limit.

You want to spill the oil at 5am, to allow it to seep into the tar, and also no one is going to actually clean it up at this time. Especially not if it’s a Monday morning!

Then say the car has to be back by 10am. You must take it back at 7am so that no one will have cleaned the road yet. Just before delivering the car you would want to make a test run past, to make sure some of the guys are at work, preparing for the day. This is the best time for this trick because they will not officially be open yet, and won’t have customers to attend to. So they can focus their full attention on the terror that is about to be unleashed outside.

For the delivery, you should be at the end of the road waiting in the beast of a rental car, revving it to the redline, making sure the engine is properly spent. Because it is no use having wrecked the body, but not the engine. You want to make sure that you have got the most from the money you paid for the insurance.

So here is what you do:

Start revving the car, to the redline and beyond. At this point, the bodywork will be looking completely debauched from hitting lamp posts and ramping the car off various sidewalks etc on your Hermanus trip.

Let the clutch out quickly, so you wheelspin off the line, leaving a trail of smoke and absolutely trashed tyres. You literally want chunks of rubber to be flying off the tyres and hitting pedestrians on the side of the road. You want complete mayhem and carnage. You want it to look like a war zone, only worse.

Then get the car up to about 80km/hr before you get to the oil that you have conveniently smeared outside the rental agency in the morning.

What you want to do as you hit the oil is to steer to the left or the right, while pulling the handbrake up. This way, your car will be sideways, sliding through the oil and you will have a massive smile on your face. Next up you want the car to be drifting backwards so that when you pass the rental agency, you can give the manager a thumbs up, while he sees his car meeting a tragic death. The look of absolute shock on his face right now will be priceless! Maybe even set a friend up with a camera, to get a shot of his face, for the next Mastercard “Priceless” campaign. Now the car will be backwards and you will want to steer a little bit to the left or right, in order to make sure that the car once again is sideways.

You will soon find yourself running out of oil on the road, and as the car is sideways, this will make for magnificent results! The car will come off the oil, onto the dry road, it will gain traction and you will find the car flipping over several times! The sound of metal crunching into hard tar will make for a mind blowing experience, like a Quentin Tarantino gore-fest of metal.

The problem here is that, just because the car has crashed, this does not mean that the engine is going to be wrecked! So as you feel the car gaining traction on the dry road, you want to put the clutch in and put your foot on the accelerator HARD! This way,when you begin to go into the fourth or fifth flip, you should hear a loud bang, as the pistons shear off in dramatic fashion. The manager of the the rental company will see a spectacular sight, as white smoke shoots out of the exhaust and he sees his car meet an untimely end. The car will now look like a piece of tin foil as it has been completely obliterated.

At this point, the car should be slowing down, to a gentle roar of broken metal and pain. Hopefully the car will land on it’s roof and you will exit, wearing your tweed suit, with the papers of the rental contract in your hand.

As you walk into the rental agency you will hear the manager shouting

“Holy mother of $&^*! Are you insane child? Do you realise what you have fu#^%&* done? F%$#!”

That’s when you pull out the papers of the contract you signed, and say:

“Sorry sir we signed the full insurance, sorry for you!”

The manager will shout:

“F%$^ child you’re pathetic!”

You reply:

“No, you’re pathetic!”

You then calmly reach into your pocket, take the keys out, and toss them to the manager, and finish off with the classic line:

“See you later, alligator”

You also want to do this to a car like a BMW, because wrecking a Datsun does not have the same effect. You want to TOTAL something that you know is going to cost the company lots of money. But you want to completely wreck it. You know when you delete a file off your computer, that it goes into the recycle bin? Well this car will not be going to the recycle bin. You want to send it to the HELL BIN! You want to smash it into a million pieces. It’s literally the most fun you can have with a small amount of money. I checked the local Avis website, and for one day I can rent an Audi A4 for R720. Sometimes you will spend that on a night out, and that is not nearly as fun as taking a car to the wrecking crew! Obviously it will be more with full insurance, but it still comes in at a bargain.

Well done! You have now been introduced to the SLXS art of renting a car. If the manager asks anymore questions just say:

“But Sean always tells me ‘Don’t be gentle, it’s a rental!”

And walk off, knowing that you are the coolest person on the planet.

You win

That is how you rent a car!

Don’t even get me started on what to do with a rental house…

Please note: I take no responsibility for damage to people or cars from actions undertaken after reading this article and in no way do I endorse the actions I have written about. It is merely an idea. An idea in my head.My crazy head.

Be careful out there

Sean Lloyd

Editor