August 20th, 2007
There are many different names I could have given the title of this article. I could have called it "F#$% Uhaul", or "The Brand with the Worst Customer Service on the Planet", but after the experience I had with Uhaul last weekend I am convinced that the company is run by Lucifer himself. To give this story a little context I'll just tell you that I am not the type of person who complains about bad customer service and acts like I'm all hoity toity, believe me you really have to do something wrong to get me talking.
It all starts out when I made my online reservation for a 5' x 8' trailor that I needed to transport my girlfriends bed and dresser up to Manhattan. So, I made the reservation online, and on the receipt it said that Uhaul would contact me a day before the pickup and let me know where and when to pick up the trailor. So, Friday came and I got no call, instead I received a text message with the address of where I could pick up. I wind up doing a map search to find out exactly where the place was. So, I typed in 2300 Genito Rd. I've lived in Richmond for almost five years, so I am pretty familiar with the area, but I didn't recognize the road.
As it turns out. 2300 Genito Road is in Powhatan, which is like forty minutes in the polar opposite direction of where I'm headed. So, agrily I call Uhaul's online ordering center and see if I can get something a little closer to home (after all, they operate like 6 facilities in Richmond). They proceed to tell me that this is the only place in the area that has the equipment that I needed.
So, begrudgingly I sucked it up and called the Genito Road location to confirm that I was coming out in the morning to pick up the equipment, and see what time I could get it. Since, I had to go all the way out to Powhatan, I figured I'd need to get on the road early so I could pick it up and get back to Richmond to load it up and take off.
Not so fast.
Apparently the girl that was opening the location the next morning didn't know how to operate the computer and would not be able to give me the proper paperwork. When I asked when I could pick up the trailor the guy told me 10:00 or 11:00AM. I nearly hit the roof. I knew that Uhaul's facilities typically shut down all over the US by 7:00PM, and I knew that I had a six to seven hour drive ahead of me to get to Manhattan.
It gets worse.
I am stuck at this point. It is too late to find any other company to rent equipment from, especially one that had a nationwide network like Uhaul, so I decided to get there at 10:00AM sharp the next morning and roll the dice. That would have been possible had I been able to find it. I wound up driving all over the countryside of Virginia for over an hour trying to find this Uhaul facility. Finally, after I had been up and down Genito Rd. a million times I noticed a Uhaul trailor sitting in what looked like the parking lot of a general store. I pulled over and went inside, and sure enough this was the "so-called" Uhaul facility that I was to pick up my equiqment. They sent me to some podunk gas station in the middle of nowhere to pick up a trailor and didn't even give me the name of the place that I was going, or warn me that there was no need to look out for a Uhaul sign.
Still, it gets worse.
Now I figured on the way out there that since I was going to a reputable place like Uhaul, surely they would have the necessary tow ball hitch there that I could buy and all the things necessary to get this thing rigged to my Ford Escape. Well, as you've probably guessed I was wrong in my assumption. So after I wasted time trying to find the place, and before I could get it onto my car I had to drive another 40 minutes roundtrip to go buy the stuff I needed to hook it up.
So, on the way back I was stressing out, I was trying to calm myself down by just telling myself "just get back, get hooked up, and get going". So I arrive back at the gas station, and the guy who I was counting on to give me my contract and help get me all set up was gone. He split. The half retarded girl that's in her mid-twenties and can't operate a computer says "He told me to give this to you". It was a leaflet with very little info
rmation in it, and certainly it had no instructions.
I wind up getting these offering these three guys that looked like they may be bad mechanics $20 to help me get hooked up, and they did, but mind you they were not employees of Uhaul. At this point I've signed no contract, and if this trailor flies off and kills someone during this 300 mile drive I am not liable at all.
That was the nightmare, and this is when I wanted to go Rocky on someone.
I finally get on 95N at 1:30PM. Let me remind you that I have to have this thing dropped off to a facility in New York by 7PM, and I know what you're thinking. Why don't you just do an overnite drop in the parking lot? Well I would, except the only place that Uhaul will not let you do this is at their Manhattan facilities.
So, I call up Lea Anne all flustered "Honey, I have no idea what we're going to do about this trailor, I'm not going to be there until like 8, and the place is going to be closed". She put me at ease a little by saying, "Oh don't worry there's usually plenty of parking on my street at night". So, we hung up and I continued to drive up.
I finally get up there, and we unload all of her stuff, and then start to look out at all of the street signs to see if parking there was cool, but the NYPD had posted temporary do not park signs on all of the posts. So we called the cops to find out what was going on, and they tell us that tomorrow is the Dominican Republic Independance Parade and her street is the main thorofare. They tell us we'll likely get towed for parking there.
So we head off, us and my 30 foot Godzilla of a Ford Escape looking for a parking spot in Manhattan. We look around for over an hour before we decide that we would be willing to pay a garage to house this beast, and we found someone who agreed. So we drove down the ramp to the garage and get stuck. The demon trailor send to me from the depths of hell is stuck and can't get in. What's worse is trying to steer it back out was impossible, and I had to disconnect it and push the damn thing by hand on to the road and reconnect it.
We finally gave up and parked in front of her apartment, and rescued it the next morning at 5AM from being towed before we had to drive 200 blocks to the bronx to drop it off. The people at the Bronx Uhaul location were a better breed, but we also discovered that the Powhatan folk had never created a contract in the first place and I had to sit there for a while getting the new one set up.
I'll probably come back and clean this up a bit later, I'm getting tired and sick just reciting it to you now. Lesson learned. Don't f#$% with Uhaul. Hey, maybe that would've been the best title after all.
Sean Taylor died this morning after being shot in the leg by an intruder at his Palmetto Bay home yesterday. This is shocking news to I'm sure everyone that knows anything about football. I am particularly saddened by this tragedy because Taylor was the best player on my favorite team and was one of my favorite players.
Our month long project for Brand America has come to an end, so I am delighted to get a chance to write again. If you know me, you've probably already heard some stories from my trip up to New York for Advertising Week, but if not I'll go ahead and fill everyone in.
Recently we were given an assignment in Kelly O'Keefe's Brand Channels class to read some articles related to how consumer's are demanding more aesthetically pleasing choices out of brands and to use that knowledge to talk about how The Home Depot fits into this realm. This assignment I'm sure came about because of the constant perception that The Home Depot is not as stylish as Lowe's and whether or not it needs to target women more.
The summer is winding down, and our internships are coming to an end. All of this got me thinking about the past year, and of what is in store for the future. My first year at the VCU Brandcenter was a trying one. It was filled with great memories, and jaded by a few bad memories. The more that I've thought over the summer, the more that I wonder to myself "Self, how did you get through this".
First of all these sacs are gigantic, they even get up to six feet in diameter. They are filled with a material called durafoam, and they claim to never wear out or go flat. This is a necessity considering the biggest of these can cost up to $1,000. Take that Ikea. How's that for grabbing high margins. What's infinitely impressive about these lovesacs is just how comfortable they actually are. You don't merely sit down on these things, you literally fall into them, and in many cases fall in love with them, hence the name. Ever since my encounter with this product, I simply can't stop thinking about them. I start thinking about how much I would enjoy one of these while watching a football game this fall, or even just enjoying a DVD. 
