Dealing With Stuff
  • Dealing With Stuff
  • About
  • Contact

Chat With a Storage Facility Manager

4/5/2017

 
PictureThis is where we ride out the zombie apocalypse
​He sounded great on the phone: a courteous, practical man with a calm demeanor. I liked him right away. In person he was even better. It's fun to chat up cheerful people who like their jobs. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to ask, let's call him Bruce, just what it's like to manage a storage facility.

Is it all junk? Mostly. A few people use their unit for work, like contractors, painters, and landscapers. That makes perfect sense; not everyone is going to want to store paint cans and lawnmowers in their apartment. In that scenario a $200-$300/month storage unit pays for itself. Most people don't have a business case for maintaining a storage unit. We only do it to postpone making decisions or confronting difficult emotions.

One tenant has had a unit at the facility since 1974, the year before I was born. I offered my working hypothesis that most storage units contain grief boxes from a loved one who has passed on, usually a parent. Bruce said that actually, it was her husband who had died. Probably she will meet him on the other side and all of those boxes will still be in the unit.

What happens to the stuff that people leave behind? It does get auctioned off, only now it's done online. People can bid on specific items. Much of the stuff is worthless. I shared about one of my toughest jobs, a storage unit that included boxes of old phone books, rusted-out cans of expired food, stained mattresses, and damp paperbacks. Bruce nodded along, obviously unfazed by the description.

"We had a hoarder who lost his unit, and it was just like that. Actually he still has two units here." From the sound of it, the three-storage-unit hoarder was struggling to keep up on his payments and was about to lose the others as well.

Had Bruce heard about the reality TV shows about storage unit auctions? Indeed he had. "They keep calling me but I won't do it." Why is that? "They're rude." Also, the shows are staged and they won't let the public in to bid on the units, only their own people. "If you watch carefully, sometimes they show the same lot on more than one show, with a couple of different items." He said they also 'salt the mine' by supplying valuable items that were not stored in the unit. This met my hunch about the few episodes I've seen; I've never seen one single item of any value in any storage unit. Much of it includes stuff people would have to pay to have hauled away.

We saw a unit with a car parked halfway inside. There was a couch with a TV at the back. "It looks like someone's living there," I remarked. "That's my parking space," said Bruce. "I take breaks there when I can get away." I asked whether people ever tried to live in the units. "Yeah, sometimes."

Bruce is a real pro. He had us drive through the gate with our 20' foot moving van. "You have a twenty-foot van and a 10 by 15 storage unit?" He tactfully offered to show it to us and we all boarded his little golf cart. The unit had a man-door. We saw at a glance that the dimensions of the unit and lack of a roll-top door made it impractical, although the cubic footage was the same as the van. We accepted the professional expertise of the estimable Bruce and allowed him to up-sell us to the next larger unit.

It took us five hours to shift the contents of the van into the new unit, which is eleven feet wide by ten feet tall by twenty feet deep. Bruce drove by on the golf cart a couple of times, glancing over and grinning at our progress. "It's like Tetris, isn't it?" We had the van empty and broom-clean with ten minutes to spare before closing time. Bruce was right; we had some wiggle room in the bigger unit but would have been wailing and gnashing our teeth with the smaller one. We couldn't have finished on time. This was a man who could size up volumes of stuff on sight. I called him a "Pack-Fu Master" and he smiled.

Storage units are a subject of endless fascination to me. What do people keep in them? Why are they willing to pay so much money every month, for years on end, with no deadline, for stuff they can't even see? I've started to think of storage facilities as our era's tombs and monuments, the places where we pay tribute to our departed dead because we have no more enduring ceremonial way to mark their passing. A Taj Mahal of box towers. Folks like Bruce are our monks, living in attendance on the temple grounds.

We plan to have our unit for about a week and a half. We're living in an Airbnb because we had less than two weeks to prepare for my husband's new job, and the alternative was a two-hour commute each way. There just wasn't time for us to look for a new place while packing to move. Our unit holds our bed, our couch, our desktop computer, the dog crate...99% of our possessions are behind that rolling door. (The rest includes the suitcases out of which we are living for the week). We told Bruce we'd see him next week. He smiled and nodded. He's heard it all before.

[We moved in on a Saturday and had moved out by close of business the following Saturday].


Comments are closed.
    New podcast!
    Clutter of the Day

    Author

    I've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years.  I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago.

    I have a BA in History.

    I live in Southern California with my husband and our pets, an African Gray parrot and a rat terrier.

    #Questioner
    #ENTP

    This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies.

    Opt Out of Cookies

    Archives

    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015

    Categories

    All
    ADHD
    Birdwatching
    Body Image
    Book Reviews
    Books
    Cleaning
    Clutter
    Fibromyalgia
    Filks
    Fitness
    Food
    Future Self
    Futurism
    Goals
    Habits
    Humor
    Languages
    Martial Arts
    Mindset
    Minimalism
    Money
    Motivation
    Moving
    Organization
    Past Self
    Pets
    Preparedness
    Procrastination
    Public Speaking
    Quests
    Relationships
    Resolutions
    Running
    Sleep
    Technology
    The-woowoo
    The-woo-woo
    Thyroid Disease
    Timemanagement
    Time Management
    Tiny Houses
    Travel
    Weight
    Work
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Dealing With Stuff
  • About
  • Contact