More like "They Haul" than U Haul U Haul
This is a long and drawn out story so let me try to make it as brief and painless as possible. I was 23 years old and leaving college for the summer to return to my home town. I had call the 800-number reservations line and arranged to pick the next to the largest truck up at a specific location. I should have seen an indication as to how this was going when I arrived at the location to pick the truck up and they had no record of my calling.
About three hours later, a truck in the city was located and I was on my way to pick it up. I had arranged for a one way destination trip so I had a total of 3 days to make the drive so I wasn’t in a huge hurry. I picked the truck up and went home. By the end of the day, I had successfully loaded everything I own with the help of a dozen friends into this massive truck and it was packed about as full as it possibly could be.
The next morning I was on my way back to my hometown for the summer. That afternoon I had arrived there and had already arranged when I picked the truck up to put my things in a U-Haul Storage Center because they were running a special for one month free rental with the truck rental. So, I began to unload everything into this storage unit also with the help of a few friends. I successfully packed all my belongings into this state of the art security center which I felt comfortable that I would not have to worry about any outside forces entering my unit or theft. I secured it with the biggest lock imaginable and left the building.
Approximately a week later, I called the credit card company to insure that my deposit I had left for the truck had been credited to my account. It had not. So, I called the location where I had returned the truck and had placed my things in storage. They told me it was "not a problem" and I filed an "immediate action report" to have the balance transferred from the credit to the rental of my storage unit. This would have more than covered 3 months rental. And, I was told was successfully transferred.
Around Sept. I went to get my things back because I was needing them at this point. Low and behold, they had no record of me. My unit was in vacant status. After them making a few phone calls, they found out that my things had been auctioned off for an unpaid account. Just like that. No apologies. No let me check into that for you. Everything I had every owned to my name was gone due to someone’s error.
The next month was misery. I dropped my classes in school because of depression. It was a hard time and no one at U-Haul appeared to even care. But the following month, I decided that they weren’t going to get away with doing that. I made as many phone calls as necessary and made lists of everything I knew was in my unit and appraisal values. Finally they released their insurance companies information and then that was almost a 2 year battle at that point. And, after two years and the advice of an attorney, I settled for about a tenth of what the replacement value was for my belongings for the sake of getting anything replaced at all.
So, one thing I have learned from this all is never trust anything that means something to you in the hands of someone else. And I will never use U-Haul again. They had made contact with the buyer of my things about a month after this happened and would not release any of his information to me to see if I could get them back. He had bought everything I owned to my name for a mere couple hundred dollars. But due to his rights as a buyer, he did not want to return them to me. I would assume that he probably just trashed the most important things such as family pictures, an irreplaceable stamp collection my great grandfather had given to me that he had collected overseas in the war, and my entire wardrobe. I had no clothes after this! What I had not put into the unit was my summer clothes! All my furniture that was enough to fully furnish a nice one bedroom house was gone. All of this for a couple hundred dollars and left me with a broken heart and absolutely nothing because someone did not do their job.
Tags: storage, truck rent
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