End of an Era; Beginning of Another

Monday, January 24, 2005, at 10:18AM

By Eric Richardson

Today marks a major transition point for me. This afternoon I went over to the body shop I had left my car at after last week's excitement and signed over the title. As of an hour or so ago I officially have no car for the first time in six and a half years. Also today, in a stroke of cinematic timing, I checked the mail before heading over to the body shop and found my membership packet for Flexcar.

I excitedly logged on to the Flexcar site today, hoping to check out reservation calendars and get a visual feel for what current car usership is like. I was stymied, though, logging in only to find a reservation form that left my dropdown options for "Region" and "Neighborhood" empty. I called and left a message with the person my welcome letter said to contact; I assume that something in the account just didn't quite get initialized correctly or that my information got to me before they were finished setting everything up in their system.

Just in case you're wondering, I used Kathy's car to go pick up my stuff from the body shop. I still have a parking permit through the end of the month, so my real experiment in being carless doesn't start for a few more days.

Update (ten minutes later): I just spoke to Elizabeth from Flexcar and she let me know that the Region/Neighborhood info wasn't showing up because I wasn't scheduled to be active until February, since that was when I had selected my plan to start. She offered to put me on the standard plan (pay for what you use) until the end of the month, and then to start my advantage plan in February. I accepted. The changes will take effect tonight, and I'll promptly dig into the system tomorrow.