If you’ve had the occasion to read my article about my dreadful experience with Budget Rent-a-Car, (Don’t Use Budget Rent-a-Car, Learn From Our Mistakes ) it may not surprise you that I’ve encountered the same kind of bad luck with the infamous Uhaul Truck Rental Company. What you may not have realized, however, is that I am not alone.
Read on for an account of my most recent accident (yes, there have been several) involving a Uhaul rental vehicle for a chuckle, a precaution, or to help put something horrible that happened to you during a move in perspective. And yes, I realize this story will be just one testimonial of Uhaul Rental Trucks Company at its most classic. However, before using that fact as reassurance when choosing to take the Do It Yourself Uhaul Truck Rental risk for your own moving adventures, I encourage you to also do a little online investigation. With little effort, you will likely be inundated with anti-Uhaul warnings, complaints and full website testimonials that support my not so lonely theory that my giant Uhaul catastrophes (there have been three total) are a bit more than just my own incidents of misfortune.
Our moving day began bright and early on a Saturday morning with a trip to the Roxbury Do It Yourself Uhaul Truck Rental retail location. It was my best friend Jessica and I, moving out of our separate units in a high rise apartment building right in the midst of downtown Boston and into a two bedroom a few blocks away that we were to share. As most find a car impractical in this city, neither Jessica nor I owned a car, so we were forced to visit the Uhaul location via two busses in order to pick up our 12 foot Uhaul rental.
If you are familiar with Boston or for some reason keep up with the crime news for this New England area, the name Roxbury might sound familiar to you. That is because Roxbury is not the safest place to hang around. In fact, despite the rumors that it has been cleaned up a bit over the years, there are some areas of Roxbury that the Boston cabs refuse to drive to out of fear for their safety and/or getting ripped off. For some reason, Roxbury seemed to be the closest Uhaul location with available trucks when we called to reserve ours, so we had no other choice but to take the excursion out there. Fortunately, for us, it was early morning when we ventured to the shady area. It also did not seem entirely scary, just a bit shoddy and rundown and the Uhaul location employees were far less than competent.
When we showed up at the Uhaul location right on time for our 8:00am reservation, the scene inside the store was all too familiar. As a regular customer of Uhaul Rental Trucks by sheer desperation and force, due to convenience and cost alone, I was not surprised to see a line out the door of angry customers and a single employee behind the desk processing the transaction in front of him at the pace of a snail with a broken foot.
It also did not surprise me, although it gave me great pleasure to witness, when an irate gentleman who received less than quality customer service from good old Uhaul proceeded to collect names and numbers of other customers in the line who were equally as unsatisfied. For some reason no matter what location you go to Uhaul never has it together. Never. At least that has been the case for me. But again, it seemed to be the cheapest and most conveniently located, so once again, this time with Jessica, I stood in line and resisted all of my urges to sacrifice the comfort of my living arrangements in an effort to never have to deal with Uhaul Rental Trucks again.
We get to the counter and that’s when the real drama begins. “I’m sorry ma’am, we don’t have the truck you reserved available, so you’ll have to go with either a smaller sized van or a 24 foot. I’ll spare you the excuses we were told, but for the record, this too had happened several times before and again, I was not in the slightest bit surprised. Only this time, the alternatives were a little trickier. You see, the van was way too small for us but the 24-foot was a stick shift. Neither Jessica nor I had driven a stick shift for several years.
We told the man that, whom I believe was the manager. He did not seem at all concerned. He even, in fact, was extra nice, offering to watch us drive it around the parking lot a little to test our stick shifting abilities. We were slightly nervous but we really had no other choice. We had agreed with our building’s management company that we would vacate our respective apartments no later than that day.
Well, I always knew Uhaul was for the most part run by many incompetent employees. But until this situation I didn’t realize just how incapable they were, not to mention sneaky greedy and careless. Again, this is at least in my experience. So basically, it happened like this. The Uhaul location manager took us out to our truck and so kindly offered to thoroughly inspect it for us to make sure it was all ready to go. I’d like to mention that usually they send you out to do that by yourself so I must admit I was fooled a bit into the extra bit of faith I had in this deal.
So we jumped in. I completely stunk as a stick shifter so Jessica opted to be primary driver.
The initial trip around the Uhaul location was to say the least, disastrous. It took us about 7 minutes total and this was not an abnormally large Uhaul facility. Not only did we stall the truck just about every few feet of forward progression, but also at one point, we got stuck in a small alley next to Uhaul location and conveniently in the middle of the road.
As you might have guessed, the second we stalled, along came another car and we panicked more trying to get the gears to shift. Naturally, our anxiety, along with the other driver’s blatant anger, impatience, honking horn and confusion, precluded the truck from budging in any acceptable amount of time. Even worse, the driver in the car we had blocked, after getting out of his vehicle to see why in the world we were in the middle of the alley, not moving, but instead, sitting in the truck staring at him and laughing hysterically, proceeded to get in the driver’s seat in Jessica’s place and maneuver the vehicle for us to the side of the alley where it was no longer obstructing his car.
Most people probably would have told us right then and there that we were not fit to use this 24 foot stick shift Do It Yourself Uhaul Rental Truck to move to our new apartment. But this was a typical Uhaul employee and we desperately needed to move immediately.
Once we managed to get the Uhaul truck back to the front office where our gracious Uhaul salesman was waiting for us, we fell for the gentleman’s proclamation that we did fairly well for being rusty at this type of operation and that after a little while we’d surely get the hang of it. He again was not concerned so we started to gain hope. Furthermore, he reminded us that once we got the vehicle going, I guess it was in third shift (I have not touched a stick since so I don’t at this moment recall for sure) we could cascade down the road easily without having to do much work. We were satisfied.
But, oops! We had forgotten that our route home was through the urban ghetto of Roxbury, MA, a place with not only stoplights (which were all red for us, naturally) at each block but people constantly crossing the street in front of traffic without looking, aimless bike riders, and every few miles or so, homeless people harassing drivers through their windows while stopped at the light in attempt to make a few bucks from selling such items as long stemmed plastic roses or American flags. So this meant that the third shift theory was pretty much out of the question, as we had to come to a stop every couple blocks and then figure out how to start the damn truck again.
Or at least that’s what we were supposed to do. I must admit that out of frantic confusion and sheer terror, along with no idea what we were doing, we managed to fly through several red lights, causing other drivers to slam on brakes, scream their horns and jerk their cars in random sideways directions to avoid getting run over by our out of control Uhaul truck. Yes, it was just delightful. I am not one to feel bad for myself but this was a really unfortunate situation for Jessica and myself.
Oh but it gets worse. We park the Uhaul truck at the apartment building we were moving out of, which, once again, was right in the heart of downtown Boston, on the Boylston St and Tremont St intersection at the corner of the Boston Common. It also just so happened that there was a very busy homeless shelter across the street and down some from the building.
There is not much to explain except that after resting a bit upstairs, Jessica ran down to unlock the truck and move it from the parking spot to the back alley near the freight elevator entrance for easy access. Well what do you know; a very panicked Jessica arrives less than two minutes later at my apartment door with very bad news. “Um…We have a little problem she said”. She wasn’t yet in tears but they were on their way.
I walked downstairs with her to see that our Uhaul truck was missing. Well, that is, it was missing from the place we parked it. It was not, mind you missing from our sight, nor, at that, the sight of probably every other person who happened to be walking on the block at the time as well as anyone who was perched in their window or store doorway to gawk at the catastrophe.
What catastrophe is that you may be wondering? Oh, nothing but the simple voluntary movement of our Uhaul truck on its very own, directly out of our parking spot, across the busy main street of Boylston and slam, right into the wall and partial doorway of the homeless shelter across the street. There it was, the front half of the truck raised onto the sidewalk and head first into the concrete wall, the back half jutted out into the street and a lovely little ribbon of bright yellow police tape tied around its entire body.
The police officer was not far away. As if we weren’t embarrassed and ashamed already, we were taunted with such sentiments as “Oooooh girl! You all are in deep Sh@t!” , “How did you guys get this truck on this here curb?”, “Someone’s about to get arrested!” and basically any type of comment that you could imagine making it ten times worse. The homeless people, at least for their enjoyment, were thoroughly amused. It may have been the most action that place had seen in at least a few days.
I was stricken with anxiety and Jessica who was being written her first ticket on her clean driving record, was in tears. Finally, after the policeman demanded we show him documents from Uhual Rental Trucks and we cornered ourselves even more when we realized that we neglected to notice, before leaving Uhaul, the absence of the vehicle’s registration, the officer began to sympathize. It may have also helped that we figured out that the truck did not even possess a parking brake. And also that Uhaul tried to not only get me to drive the thing back to the center before giving me another truck, but they refused to take responsibility and additionally, refused a refund.
I am convinced, for the record, that had the Uhaul truck contained a parking brake, my dear friend and I would have known, habitually how to use it. It seems that this would be just one of those driving things that comes back to you no matter how long it has been. Surely, if that brake had been under her knee where she could feel or see it, she would not have even thought twice about utilizing it. However, being that it was not there, it was very easy to forget. You know the cliché, out of sight out of mind.
Eventually, the officer advocated for us and told the Uhaul rep off, lecturing him on the importance of customer service. He then demanded that someone from their office come out to tow the rental truck since clearly the customers in question (that would be us…) did not know how to properly operate the vehicle and in addition, the thing was not legal to drive. They did finally oblige and the officer removed the ticket from Jessica’s responsibility and transferred the fault to Uhaul, but we were then left to find another Uhaul (yes, we resorted to this company once again) that would rent us a truck we needed at the last minute. And I never was able to get my money refunded.
I’d love to say the moral of the story is to not use Uhaul Truck Rental but I’ve managed to use them about six times since this incident. I can’t really say why I haven’t learned my lesson (remember from previously, this would be accident number three) about Uhaul’s ineptness but when you live in the city, I have to admit, a convenient location and very cheap price is imperative. And those two necessities scarily often overrule safety and comfort.
Stupid? Crazy? Perhaps both. I will say though that despite the three mishaps I’ve had more successful Uhaul truck trips than problematic ones. I guess it’s all about chance, financial capabilities and priorities. If you do ever decide to use Uhaul, though, just remember to proceed with caution. You really don’t ever know what you are going to get.
Reference:
- Don’t Use Budget Rent-a-Car, Learn From Our Mistakes
