My slightly weird Long Island rental car experience

Alma and I went to Long Island this week for one of her interviews. Our flight was a late departure, scheduled to get into Islip at 10:50 pm. Since the standard rental brands (like Avis and Hertz) that were located at the airport closed at 11 pm, I had to take a flyer on "E-Z Rent-a-Car," an off-brand and off-terminal company which had the virtue of remaining open until midnight. But then it turned out that the flight was delayed almost an hour and we didn't get to Islip until 11:45. Panicking slightly, I pulled out my phone as soon as we landed and called the number I had for them, hoping to confirm that they would stay open just long enough for me to get a car.

Guy: "Hello?"
Me: "Hi, um, is this E-Z Rent-a-Car?"
Guy: "Yeah, yeah, sure."

He told me to take the shuttle bus to the Holiday Inn and met us in the parking lot with the car a few minutes past midnight, inviting us to put our bags in the trunk before we went inside to the office to do the paperwork. (My immediate thought, which I brushed aside as paranoid nonsense: "His accomplice will come and drive the car away while we're inside!" Alma later told me she had thought the exact same thing.)

The "office" turned out to be a glorified closet off a small corridor just behind and to the right of the Holiday Inn's front desk. The door had a piece of paper taped to it with "E-Z Rent-a-Car" printed on it. The office contained a desk with two chairs in front of it (and one behind it), with a laptop on the desk and a printer on the back shelf. After taking my license and credit card and slowly entering the information by hand into a laptop, the guy spent several minutes trying to print a receipt, but never got the printer working. Eventually he slowly copied all the information from the screen onto a form, by hand, and gave me a copy. He said he would probably run the credit card "tomorrow." When I asked where to drop the car off on Wednesday, he told me I could bring it to a nearby gas station, and the guy there would give us a ride back to the airport. Which is, in fact, what ended up happening Wednesday morning.

All this was vaguely weird and makes for kind of a funny story, but I have to say that it was really no better or worse than any rental car experience I've had, all things considered. I had a car, it was fairly cheap, I got a ride back to the airport... and hey, if we had been talking about a national brand, instead of an obvious off-brand franchise, would the guy have waited after midnight for us? Maybe not.