Andy Taylor, CEO
Enterprise Car Rental
andrew.c.taylor@erac.com
Dear Mr. Taylor,
On 20 October 2009, Enterprise’s Citations Department sent me a letter informing me that on 24 September 2009 at 9:11 AM, a red light camera captured a photograph of an Enterprise vehicle rented to me, running a red light in Cary, NC.
They were kind enough to inform me that Enterprise would be charging me $10 as a fee for passing on this information to me, and also for the service of transferring my information in turn to the private firm that runs Cary, North Carolina’s red light camera system. Happily, I had six days from the date of this letter to dispute this amount.
Since I received the letter on 27 October, I fear that it is impossible to dispute that amount within your firm’s stated timeframe. And when I tried to call the Citations Department, I was on hold for a long, long time before I finally concluded that I was wasting my time, in fact.
(The service at your Franklin Street branch in Chapel Hill, NC could not be better, which is why I’m mystified that these same high standards of customer service don’t apply on the phone.)
Mr Taylor, here are the facts of the matter:
(1) I did indeed rent a car from Enterprise for several days, from 23 to 27 September. It was, if memory serves, a Chevrolet Impala, and there are rather a lot of them on the road, I’ve noticed.
(2) I was nowhere near Cary, NC on the morning of 24 September; I was hard at work in my home office in Chapel Hill, and I have several date- and time-stamped e-mails (with many recipients, all of whom can corroborate time of receipt) to prove it. These are, if I may say so, long, thoughtful and detailed e-mails, and to put it mildly they are not the sort of thing one could manage while driving, even if one were stupid enough to text and drive simultaneously.
(3) I accept that Safelight Cary, the private company running Cary, NC’s red-light camera revenue generation—pardon me, traffic enforcement—service, feels that they have identified a car that has been linked to me as a renter, and clearly they have reached out to Enterprise to identify the wrongdoer.
(4) Since we’ve eliminated the possibility that I was driving in Cary on the 24th of September, the remaining possibilities would seem to be -
a. The red-light camera company is mistaken. (This strikes me as likeliest.)
b. My wife is lying to me when she tells me that she was driving our Mazda 5 that day, and she has dark reasons of her own for wanting to be in Cary, NC at 9 o’clock on a random morning, in a car that I rented for myself. (This strikes me as rather unlikely.)
c. Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa materialized in my yard on the morning of the 24th and decided to take a joyride… to Cary. In my rentacar. Poor bastards.
I’m sure there’s got to be some mechanism for resolving this within your company—and with Safelight Cary, the private firm running their red-light cameras--but so far I can’t figure out what it is. Can you help me? I’ve found an attorney here in town, but I’d really rather not go down that path.
Yours sincerely,
Barry T. Campbell
Confirming copies to:
Enterprise Car Rental – Citations Department
PO Box 22233
Tulsa, OK 74121
