Schrödinger's Rental Car

I had hoped to post some nice photos for you today, as a complement to Grim's travel pics. However, apparently reserving a rental car in advance no longer guarantees that there will be a real car waiting for you at the appointed time and place. Some of you, maybe all, probably knew that but I discovered it yesterday. I had reserved a car two days in advance and, in the past, I'd always been able to rely on my reservation.

(Below the fold you may find the rest of this rather pedestrian story explaining why you may or may not ever get a rental car again, along with comments on Schrödinger's thought experiment and even a dramatic suggestion.)

However, yesterday I showed up and there was no car. An employee at the company had texted me earlier that day saying "I'm sorry but we have no availability today," but his message did not have the company name in it and did not mention a car or a rental, so I assumed it was spam.

After trying to get a vehicle at another location, and then at other companies, I learned that all of the rental cars in the OKC metro area were spoken for and the best I could do instead of the mid-size sedan I had planned on was a 16-foot moving truck from Budget.

One nice young woman at a car rental place helpfully explained that, when you call, reservation centers just check how many cars are supposed to be returned against how many reservations they have on record for your particular area on your particular day and if the number to be returned is higher than the number of existing reservations, then they'll "reserve" a car for you. 

However, not everyone returns their rental cars on time, and people can extend their rentals with little warning. In addition, reservation centers just assume the various branches of their company in an area can quickly shuttle cars back and forth, so they are checking numbers for an area, like the OKC metro area with its 1.4 million people, and not for the particular location at which you expect to find the car you reserved. So, there may or may not be a car, and no one will know until a real person checks on the day in question.

Now, if there were some way we could make this depend on a random subatomic event, maybe we could spare that poor cat.

Most or all of you might already know as well that Schrödinger actually proposed his famous thought experiment with a cat as a form of reductio ad absurdum argument against the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics. See, he said, this sort of thing could happen if we buy that interpretation. But instead his thought experiment was adopted into the system. No doubt the rental car company AI would likewise just adopt my proposed cat replacement into its system.

By the way, Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen explores some of the themes of early quantum physics through a meeting between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. There is a DVD out there somewhere; maybe the library can get it? It's enjoyable just to read as well.