Hollywood Storage

Here is the promised blog about my storage woes. Warning: what you are about to read is just complete and utter whining about the ridiculous things in this world that we have no real control over.

I have been storing my vast amounts of worldly goods in a 10x10 ft storage unit for about a year now. As I have made the transition back to the South from places near and far, I have collected a fair amount of what is basically so much sentimental junk. I am a sucker for anything lovingly hand-crafted or things that bear a touching sentiment. I keep boxes of old letters and cards, just because I cannot endure the thought of throwing them out. So, I have lugged this stuff, once again, across the country to be safely looked after by the people who owned an air-conditioned storage company called Evans Best Storage. I happily paid my money every month so that my precious keepsakes and pieces of furniture, that all have emotional attachments for me, could have a comfortable home away from home.

About six weeks ago I received a letter from said storage company informing me of some new changes they were making. First, they informed me that they would be changing the name to Hollywood Storage. Second, they wondered if I had noticed the new search lights blazing through the night sky. I had noticed them. I thought the county government had built a new airport close to my house I wasn't aware of. They also informed me about other changes that would soon take place, now that they had a new identity.

One of those changes came about a week and a half after the first letter. This letter boldly proclaimed that as a storage unit user I would now be paying eight dollars more a month for my unit. That is exactly one tenth more than what I had been paying per month. Nowhere in this new letter did they explain exactly why they now had to extort more of my hard earned cash, but I knew why. When I sent my payment in for that month I wrote down a few of my questions about the change in price. I asked, "What do I care whether my storage unit is called Hollywood Storage or Evans Best Storage?" "What does it accomplish to put huge (and apparently expensive) search lights on top of my storage unit?" "I don't exactly want the entire free world to know where I keep my stuff." "Do you really think that putting search lights on the building will attract more customers, or just more bored teenagers driving around trying to establish where the source of light is coming from?" And, finally, "Why should I pay more for changes that don't actually do anything for me?" I asked all these questions to no avail. No one answered my desperate plea for information or sane reasoning. I think they honestly thought that the customers were not going to put two and two together and come up with "this is a load of horse hockey".

So, this month, I moved out. I said good-bye to Evans Best Storage (as they had yet to put my money to the use of actually changing the sign), and I happily tore up the bill that was asking for more of my money to finance their life-long dream of owning a storage unit that looks like the back lot at MGM or Universal Pictures.