I could have told them not to mess with her.

She came home around noon after spending the morning dealing with the car rental agency, the one that had a hold on our credit card funds to the tune of over 900 dollars when all they had coming to them was 460.
"How'd it go?" I asked. She hadn't wanted me to go with her. She didn't need anybody murdered. Yet.
"I had to be a bitch today," she said.
When she returned the damaged van Friday night at 10 hours 15 minutes and 17 seconds into the P.M., she had been told that it would take forty-eight hours for the transaction to be processed and the hold lifted. At midnight Sunday she called the credit card company and found out the hold was still in place. At eight A.M. Monday morning she entered the Central Florida Administrative Headquarters for the Budget car rental agency. I figure it's the place where they count money and compare suits.

At the desk in the lobby sat Isabel, with a phone wedged between her shoulder and the side of her face. "May I help you?" her voice exuding vague interest, her face indifference. She seemed to be on hold and wanted the phone to speak to her.

My wife gave her a concise rundown of the misery that had been inflicted on her by her, Isabel's, company - the number of times, for example, she'd called only to be put on hold for upwards of fifteen minutes - and now that she'd paid her bill and the insurance paperwork was all in order, she was here to speak to an administrator about getting the hold lifted on her credit card funds. It's my money, you have no right to it, let it go.

There's no one here you can talk to, says Isabel.
Excuse me? says the wife.
There's no one here. You have to talk to someone from claims by phone.

What Isabel was recommending was that my wife go home and start over. Give us a ring, won't you, so that we can put you on hold again.

I will talk to an administrator, she says. I'm not going away. Do you understand? (I can just hear her voice rising, quivering just a little with distress and anger.)

Excuse me, says Isabel. The phone finally talks to her. "I'll wait," says the wife loudly. She crosses the room and sits down. She listens while Isabel haggles with the bank over a returned rent check. She makes a note of the fact that Isabel is conducting personal business on company time. She (the wife) has a lapful of papers with names, times of phone calls, substance of calls, length of hold time, etc. Quite exhaustive, and intimidating to whoever has to deal with her. When Isabel hangs up, two guys who look like employees emerge from a door behind her. She assists them with some request and they disappear. So there was someone in the building other than Isabel. She rises to re-cross the room and reassert her demand.

Isabel tries the old routine, but (I could have warned Isabel in advance) she's not going away. "Just a minute," says Isabel, getting a little snippy. She punches some buttons. Pause. "I've got this woman here," she says into the phone. This woman here. Oh, I wish I'd have been there to see the glare that kills. Having been on the receiving end, I'd like to see someone else get it for a change. "You can talk to someone from claims," says Isabel, "on that phone over there," and she points to it. The wife crosses the lobby to the phone and starts talking to Lynette. Lynette listens for a while to the whole story, then morphs into Isabel. "There's no one here to talk to about that."

Am I not, asks the wife, at the Administrative Headquarters for Budget of Central Florida? Are you telling me there are no administrators in the administrative headquarters?

We're in the process of moving our headquarters to Virginia Beach so there's no one to talk to... Then give me the number of a CEO, an administrator somewhere, here or in Virginia Beach or at Ice Station Zebra who can take care of this for me, someone who can release my money.

Well, what will happen is that after the vehicle is fixed and the claim processed, you'll receive a letter...Notifying me of what? I've taken care of my end. And when will I get that letter? "Probably" by September first...I might need that money for an emergency. Now give me a phone number. Now!

She is put on hold. She is coming to regard the telephone as either an invention of the devil or punishment from God. It's supposed to be a communication device, but is really a means for keeping people at a distance. She figures she's got release time from purgatory coming to her for all the hours spent on hold.

But a few minutes later a man emerges from that door behind Isabel; the wife had started thinking of it as the "nobody's behind me" door. The man, she told me later, looked very administrative, very managerial, very CEO-ish. My name's Greg, he said, and I understand there's a problem. Here we go again. She explains, he listens. He asks for a copy of her bill, then says,"Excuse me for a minute," and disappears again through that door behind which nobody works. Fifteen minutes later he re-emerges with Eileen, who works for him. He hands the wife a piece of paper demonstrating that a seven hundred and something dollar hold on her card has been lifted. And the other two hundred? she asked. (That two hundred was incurred when she reserved two vehicles, an Explorer and a Windstar, cancelling one at the time of rental. But the hold had not disappeared at the time of cancellation.) That, said Greg, would probably just fall off in few days. Here's Eileen's number. You can call her anytime.

What Greg and Eileen and Lynette and Isabel and the whole administrative universe with "nobody's behind me" doors behind which nobody worked who could talk to anyone or get anything done didn't know was that we had a backup plan. If my wife's efforts had proved unsuccessful, we had arranged with the credit card people to move our balance and available credit to a new card with a new number, so that when the agency finally sent it through they'd get nothing. Before leaving, she stopped by Isabel's desk. "Thank you, Isabel, you've been such a big help."

When she got home, she called the card company and, sure enough, the 700 plus hold was gone. And the other two hundred, asked the wife? It was still pissing her off. "It's gone," said the customer service rep. "How?" asked the wife. "I just deleted it. Once they released the other, they had no rights to the two hundred."

"So," I said. "You won."
"Yes."
"You may be a bitch, but you're my kind of bitch."
"Thank you."

You cannot keep her down. God save the Queen.