Just arrived in Birmingham and walked over to pick up my reserved car at Alamo for the drive to Tuscaloosa. But apparently my name shows up on a "do not rent" list for Alamo. There's no reason for this and the agent says that the national customer service phone numbers are closed on a Sunday, so I'm out of luck.
I walk over to Enterprise and rent a car--a nice Mazda, for cheaper. Alamo's database systems need work.
The funny thing is that this had happened once before--when I tried to rent from National at JFK a couple of years ago. Then, I had called when I had returned home to be told that I was denied because my NY driver's license was no longer valid. Of course, since I had moved to California, I had a California license, which I had presented. But since I once had a NY license that had since expired, I wasn't allowed to rent. I thought I had fixed the problem with the phonecall, but apparently not.
There's a Kafkaesque quality to all this, and one can only imagine the consequences of more serious database errors.