Which means I'm going to tell you about my most complicated move. But first, I'm going to tell you about why parts of it were hell.
Last year I basically blew up my life and in August moved back home to Chicago from LA. This is the fourth time I've gone up and back like that, and this time I had the most stuff. So Nick, aka the world's best brother no seriously, took some time off work and flew out to help me. I was getting a trailer hitch installed on my car, which was supposed to be a two-hour process, so we decided to hang out there while it was being done. We waited an hour, then got bored and headed over to the Norm's across the street to get drinks. When we got back, they still weren't done. When I scheduled my trailer pickup, I was told I had to get the hitch installed at one location and then would get the trailer itself at another one nearby. So now that I was going to be late in picking it up I had to call location #2 to let them know. Everything's cool.
5:00 comes. We've been there three hours. I had to keep asking whenever one of the guys comes to the front of the store to ask what's going on, and only one told me anything. He said that they were having problems drilling the necessary holes into my car, and they were having trouble getting someone else to come help, but they'd get it.
6:30 comes. Nick is liveblogging this all to Facebook and keeping time in the running time of the movie Hitch. We'd been there for two Hitches so far. I had to call the other location, which closed at 7, to find out what to do if they couldn't finish the job in time and I basically got "Well, you can pick it up tomorrow." As we were planning on being on the road around 6 am the next day, this was a problem. When the guy who'd been working on the car finally came out of the garage and said, "I'm not going to be able to finish the job tonight. But tomorrow, if you-"
Have you ever had one of those moments where you lose all control over yourself, and you can just feel the words coming out of you? I had that. I remember barking, "NO. WE HAVE BEEN HERE FIVE HOURS. YOU ARE GOING TO GO RIGHT BACK IN THERE AND FINISH THE JOB," and that was about it. I was shaking with rage and by the time I finished, the mechanic turned to the other guy and said, "Call the other location and bring the trailer over here," and then turned back to me, saying, "I'm going to get this finished for you tonight." And then he offered me his chair. Nick can back me up on alllll of this.
They moved fast, with the mechanic going back to the garage and the other guy immediately getting keys to go to the other location. I should note that for most of the day there weren't other customers (though lines would build up at times because no one was working the counter), and Nick and I were alone in the U-Haul store, sitting on the floor or on boxes, and as soon as we were alone again I started nervous giggling with adrenaline. Nick said he was going to help me, and then saw I was busy striking fear into the hearts of U-Haul workers and sat back and let me go.
The guy took a long time to get back with the trailer, and it was getting dark. We could hear a lot of cursing and tools being thrown from the garage, but still there were no updates about what was going on. I was starting to panic now, wondering if we could still leave at the scheduled time tomorrow, and oh god what if this was a sign that I was making a terrible mistake and shouldn't move. And when he did come back with the trailer, he ended up closing down the shop with us still inside and left for the night, leaving the one mechanic who'd taken an entire workday to get nothing done. After nightfall it was a lot of being bored and tired and hungry, locked in a closed U-Haul store, like a low-rent version of that Saved By the Bell episode where they locked themselves in the mall overnight. At one point the alarm started going off for no reason, and the mechanic let us out, and then once we were outside asked for help in getting wires through the car, or to make sure the lights were working the way he needed. Yes, we ended up helping out on the work for my own car.
We got out of there at just before 10:30, which was about eight hours after we got there for a two-hour process. I still wanted to leave in the morning, so we actually tried to get some of my stuff out of my second floor apartment and into the truck. But we were both exhausted, we were both injured (I'd had a door opened on my wrist and sprained it, then sprained my knee and ankle after not noticing a giant water spill at Target, and Nick had fallen at the airport and spent a good portion of the day with ice in his sock for his own sprained ankle, and why yes klutziness does run in our family), and it was dark, and I was having panic attacks. But because Nick's the best brother ever, anytime I'd lose it and start flailing around or crying because this wasn't going right, he stayed very calm, and he basically talked me into calling it a night. Since we'd gotten to my place so late, there was nowhere I could park a car with a trailer, but there was a church parking lot next door that was empty. I left a note on it literally reading "Please don't tow me," and walked back to my apartment. We'd disassembled my bed so I let him have the couch and curled up on the floor with a blanket and pillow.
That was the night I learned you can have anxiety attacks in your sleep. I remember having dreams about my car getting towed or the trailer that had some of my stuff getting broken into. I got four hours of "sleep" and when I woke up I was still shaky and exhausted and we had to take the rest of my apartment apart and get the trailer packed up. It was a very long process, since a lot of what I'd planned to do the night before involved getting the last of my stuff packed and cleaning the apartment, which I wasn't really able to do because we couldn't get out on the road till several hours after I planned. I decided to toss a lot of stuff rather than taking the time to pack it up. Nick ripped apart some of my cheaper furniture to put in the dumpster. I had time to shower because I was sweaty and gross, I dropped off my keys at the rental office, and then we were out.
If you think the U-Haul saga ended there, though, you are mistaken! See, we had some minor problems with the fact that if I tried to back up, the trailer would turn so that it would be at a 45 degree angle with my car and then it wouldn't go any further. It made it difficult to park at hotels a lot of the time, but I managed with it. And then when we were driving through Colorado, I noticed a noise. At first I thought it was just that sound you hear on certain kinds of pavement, but when I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw that the back driver's side wheel on the trailer was shaking, so I figured we were getting a flat. Luckily there was a rest stop up ahead, and I pulled off to check it out. As I made the turn into the rest area proper, there was a loud BANG and the car shook, and I thought that was it, we'd had a blowout. When we got out of the car, we hadn't exactly had a blowout. The entire wheel was missing from the trailer. The tire hadn't just gone missing. We're talking the axl was dragging on the ground, and caused dig marks into the street.
I called roadside assistance, half-laughing because come on now I mean really at this point, and we were lucky that a cop happened upon us. He'd had something like this happen when his family was on vacation, and he asked where this started and drove around that section of the freeway to look for the wheel. He didn't find it, and while I was on the phone with roadside assistance by the car I saw Nick and the cop heading away from the car, towards a group of people. It was a group of tourists that had been walking around, and happened to find the wheel. It had popped off the car. And flown. A hundred feet away. Into a bush.
Yep, after the whole mess with the hitch two days before, they'd given us a trailer with bald tires, rust and holes in the metal. Roadside assistance kept trying to tell us if we could find the bolts they could just repair the tire, not understanding that all but two of the bolts had been ripped off the trailer and were lost to the ether. We found other bits and pieces of metal that had just been shredded. The other side of the trailer also had much of the same balding/rusting thing going on, and the cop took one look at it and said it was too dangerous to have been given that, and if I hadn't pulled off and the wheel had popped off while driving someone could have been killed. Thanks, U-Haul!
Roadside assistance was sending a tow truck over, and so the cop and tourists left us. As the sun came down and we realized that luckily the hotel we'd already booked for the night was only about fifteen minutes away, the tow truck driver showed up. There were two very nice guys who worked for a U-Haul/tow place nearby, and they got the trailer off my car and brought it on over to their shop. There we learned that it was too late and too dark for anyone to help us, and roadside assistance said the earliest they could get a team out there to help us move would be at least noon the next day. We'd already lost a day thanks to U-Haul being incompetent assholes, so we agreed to be reimbursed $100 and move everything ourselves. We left the trailer and all my stuff at the U-Haul place, went to our hotel, and at 7 am before they were open, we were back at the U-Haul place to unload the old broken dangerous trailer and put everything in the new one.
And if you think that is the end of the U-Haul saga, you are still mistaken! When I got to Illinois I had to file complaints and claims for reimbursement that never went anywhere. I'd call to follow up and find out that it'd been closed without notice. They'd reopen and promise someone would give me a call and then I wouldn't get a call. I'd call them and find out it'd been closed. Apparently the manager of the store where I'd gotten my trailer hitch installed refused to do anything about it and would just shut it down every time the complaint came through for him to deal with. He was quoted as blaming me for the whole thing, insisting that if I had pulled off as soon as I heard a noise (which I'd absolutely pulled off at the safest possible opportunity; curving around mountains is not a safe place to stop on the ride of the road) there wouldn't have been a problem. It ended with me getting a friend to give me the number to a lawyer and then leaving one more message on U-Haul's Facebook page threatening that the next time they heard from me it'd be through a lawyer. That's when I started getting calls, and after two months of fighting with them, I got reimbursed fairly. Also, I found out that there was video from inside the U-Haul store, and while I'm not sure there was sound, someone had had to watch the video to prove that we'd been there as long as we said we had, and so someone definitely got to see me rip the mechanic a new asshole.
In short, use Budget for all your rental needs.
I think it's important for me to note that I hadn't just sprained my ankle, but the other foot was so bruised that my big toe was black all around, and I was able to track the passage of time over the next week by seeing how much of that faded each day. Also, you yelling at the U-Haul guy is the closest I've ever come to witnessing a bear attack. It was awesome.
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