Everything related to my move from Wisconsin to Maryland has been going swimmingly until today. You, the great people of Oppo, even took some assorted old car lighting off my hands. But today, I got a call from U-Haul about my reservation for this weekend. Uh oh.
I had reserved a 20 foot moving truck and a car trailer. The plan was to pick up the truck on Saturday, have movers load it on Sunday morning, then pop back over to U-Haul on Sunday to hook up the car trailer and put my wife’s car on it, and hit the road. But today, U-Haul called me and said none of the stuff I reserved was going to be available at any of the U-Haul locations in Madison. This was a bit of a WTF to me but my wife FLIPPED. THE. FUCK. OUT.
The first solution they proposed was to pick up the truck & trailer from a U-Haul location in Reedsburg, which is a good hour and change north of Madison. That wouldn’t work, especially if we wanted to do the car trailer on Sunday. Oh, but they’d knock 90 bucks off the price.
Then they came to the idea of picking up the truck from a U-Haul location in Janesville, about 45 minutes south of Madison, on Saturday, and then getting the car trailer from the Madison U-Haul on Sunday. They split the reservation and sent me confirmation numbers.
A friend graciously agreed to give me a ride to Janesville to pick up the truck, so my wife could stay home doing final cleaning and stuff, rather than waste almost 2 hours round trip to Janesville just to give me a ride.
I tried to call each of these locations to confirm the stuff would be there. The Janesville one is actually a tire store that also does U-Haul and they have the truck there ready and waiting.
The Madison location is the U-Haul store and while I called the local number, I got transferred to yet another call center, where I learned that there’s a car trailer that a customer is supposed to return sometime between now and Sunday. Will it be there in time for me? Maybe it will, maybe it won’t!
In theory, we could still do the Sunday car trailer pickup in Janesville, because they have car trailers, and it’s on our way out of town, but they’re not open on Sunday.
So now I have to keep checking in with U-Haul between now and when I go pick up the truck in Janesville, because if the car trailer that’s supposed to be returned to Madison might not be ready in time, I’ll have to get a car trailer in Janesville, pull it back to Madison, and I might actually drop it off at the Madison U-Haul overnight. Because that way it’s not in the way of the movers loading the truck, and on Sunday the U-Haul people can make sure the car is properly loaded on the trailer and the trailer is properly attached to the truck.
UPDATE: I called U-Haul again. The Janesville tire store where I’m picking up the truck doesn’t have car trailers. A different Janesville location has 5 of them though. I’m keeping my name on the car trailer that may or may not be available in Madison in time, and calling back Saturday morning to check on its status. If it’s not going to be there in time, I’ll switch my reservation to one of the 5 car trailers at Janesville location #2. But I can’t put my name on one of those yet unless I take my name off the one that might be in Madison. The U-Haul dispatch lady said she highly doubts all 5 trailers at the second Janesville location will be gone by then. Fingers crossed.
Le sigh.