The Rental Car Accident

So I have a story about a “friend”.

My friend, I’ll call him Joe, had a foreign roommate who wanted to rent a car. The roommate was only 21, not old enough to rent a car; not to mention the fact that the only credit card the roommate had was his Dad’s. It didn’t look like the roommate would be renting a car anytime soon.

But Joe’s roommate wanted to do something special to celebrate dating his girlfriend for 100 days so Joe took pity on the roommate and did something very stupid. He rented the car for him, in his own name. To save a little money they decided not to get the insurance because – I don’t know – they were stupid.

Well as the astute reader can probably guess the phone call soon came and with it news of the collision. Luckily no one was hurt and the damage was only to the rental car.

It didn’t look too bad but there was damage in three places – the bumper, the light, and the fender. Actually the light didn’t look bad. It appeared to just be knocked out and just needed to be put back together, but that was not the case. It would cost an additional $400 to replace that too. The total came to around $1870 (in Canadian dollars of course) which the roommate did not have. He would have to borrow.

It was about a week into a new month and the roommate hadn’t payed his rent that month yet. Because he couldn’t afford to pay the damage as it was, he immediately dropped out of school and moved back to Calgary. Joe figured he would just use the damage deposit for the last month’s rent – that’s what he usually did anyway. Near the end of that same month, when it came time to pay up for the car, the roommate came back for his stuff (which had been sitting in the room indicating that even though the roommate wasn’t living there, he was still “living there”) and to pay for the damages. He had borrowed most of the amount oweing from friends but didn’t pay the full amount robbing Joe of a month’s rent about $375.

Since Joe had lied about who would be, and who had been driving the car at the time of the accident, there was pretty much nothing he could do. The story has a few morals:

• Always get insurance
• Don’t lie about who is going to drive – even if it’ll save you a few bucks
• Don’t assume your roommate will pay up and hold his stuff until he does (if you can)
• It doesn’t always pay to be a good guy especially if you have to lie
• (and my personal favorite) honesty is the best policy

The sad thing is, Joe even knew there was a really good chance this guy would get into an accident. But he just felt unnaturally compelled to help the guy out. Chalk the whole thing up to gaining experience I guess.