Avis Car Rental

Today we had a "chavaya" with our car rental. We have to start calling these situations chavayot otherwise we'd cry with how many setbacks we've had in our short time here. We're driving from Chashmonaim to Modiin and the car starts shaking. We get to our destination, check out the tires and everyone looks okay. We then continue on our way and the shaking persists. We call the Avis emergency number and we are given two choices. Either go to Lod or J"M. I call the Lod office and tell them that I am not driving the car on the highway and they said they would come and pick it up. We have a little problem, they tell me. We have no more cars to give you as a replacement BUT we know what the problem is with your car and it should take 20 minutes max. to fix plus travel time. Okay, we agree. What choice did we have. Without going into too much detail, mainly b/c I'm exhausted, I'll cut to the end of the story. After many wasted hours (not a mere 20 minutes as promised) we were told that there is nothing wrong with the car. They said that we don't know how to use the gears. GEARS you may ask, in an automatic car. We wondered the same thing. Apparently they have this novel idea in Israel. The cars are automatic with an optional semiautomatic setting for those joy seekers. Basically, we just had the gear pushed over too much. What an absolute waste of a day. I decided however that I wasn't going to stress out about it but rather just relax and enjoy my downtime. And I did.