Over the Easter vacation we decided that if we hired a car rather than use some other form of public transport to visit family in another part of the country we could get out and explore the area rather than just sit around chatting the entire time.  After all with all the advertising that these big car hire companies have, it should be just a matter of ringing up and reserving the right sized vehicle on the relevant date for the daily amount quoted, right?  Well that’s what we thought anyway, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, strangely enough it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Actually getting the right size of vehicle for the dates is simple enough if you book far enough in advance, but when it comes to the cost of hiring a car, the quoted daily figure is just a drop in the ocean to what is needed in actual “money in the bank” terms.  In order to pick up the keys of our car, which was only a compact family sized vehicle (nothing fancy) we were required to give a credit card imprint that basically put a hold on about £500 of our finances.  This we were told was the insurance excess that we would need to pay should anything go wrong with the car.  We were only hiring the car for a few days and the insurance was coming out at more than my pet insurance charges for an entire year! We were of course offered a reduced excess rate if we were prepared to pay the insurance premiums to upgrade our cover, but as this was going to cost over £100, plus we’d still have a couple of hundred pounds blocked on our credit card to cover the remaining excess we decided to cut our losses, keep our fingers crossed at hope that the other drivers played nice on the roads!  Our luck held and we returned the car in the same pristine condition it was in when we hired it and the hold on our credit card finances was released.  We took digital photos to prove there was no damage to the car when we returned it, but these weren’t needed and the hire company released our insurance excess “deposit” within 24 hours.

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Another area that almost caused us a financial problem was in the area of child seats.  These are required by law and the car companies are milking this one for what they can.  With a daily charge that’s more than the average cheap booster seat costs in the shop, my advice to anyone who needs one is to buy their own and then donate them to a charity shop or other goodwill cause afterwards if you no longer need them. 

I feel slightly battered by the entire hire car experience, but definitely a lot more knowledgeable about how it all works than I was a few weeks back.  We will hire a car in the future, but next time we’ll be wiser about what the real charges will be, especially with respect to the hundreds of pounds they “fence off” on the credit card until the vehicle is returned. 

My favourite type of office is the large, bright modern type. You know the kind I mean, all key fobs and coffee vending machines and everything is either glass or Teflon. 

On the whole, the sleek uniformity of the corporate working environment tends to be a bit unpopular. At best it can be described as impersonal and, at worst, a bit sinister. However big offices are the best kind, for one simple reason. When you are at work in a big office you can pretend you are in space.

Here’s my top ten tips for pretending your office is a spaceship.

Ask your boss for a wireless headset. Then you can pretend that you are Captain Scarlett or, if you prefer, Madonna every time you answer the phone. The effect is better enhanced if you stare into the middle distance when using your headset and say things like “This is Leitenant Caracha, Captain, I’m on the bridge and they’re coming straight for us!”

Every time you open or close a door make Shhhhp noises, like the doors do in space programmes on the telly, or in any normal Gloucestershire property.

Every time you walk out of the main entrance without wearing a space suit pretend that you are suffocating from a lack of oxygen.

Equally, every time anyone else tries to walk out of the main entrance, rugby tackle them to the floor and scream “Don’t go out without a space suit, you’ll die out there!”

When in the canteen order weird futuristic sounding spacey type food, like “a star bun” or “an atmosphere sandwich”

When you get your food look at it dubiously and ask why is it not shrink wrapped in foil packaging.

Wear a goldfish bowl on your head and moon walk up and down the corridor.

Walk into other people’s offices and ask them if anyone knows where the Atomising Hydrogen Chamber is.

Chat up boys at work by asking them to show you more of this Earth thing called kissing.

Next time you order anything from a vending machine, pretend that it is an alien being left over from an ancient civil war and sent through time by a war lord to infiltrate your spaceship disguised as a packet of Hula Hoops and the minute it is released from the machine it attacks your neck, pinging you screaming to the floor.

We've been given a whole load of 'money-off' schemes via work this week, my favourate being getting a sculptra face lift. Birmingham branch is where I'd have to go to make myself look

young and beautiful again! Well lets face it, we can't all be as beautiful as I am!