I live in Hamilton.

June 30th, 2008 Posted in Day to Day

What a tumultuous couple of months ( I love that word).  I’ve been moving from Toronto to Hamilton for almost two months now.  It is officially over.

I’ve been back and forth so many times in the past few weeks I’ve lost count. This weekend we loaded up the last truck and moved everything to Hamilton. As of 7pm Sunday, I live 100% in Hamilton.  We chose one heck of a weekend to move though. According to U-Haul, this weekend is the worst weekend of the entire year to rent a truck. I think everyone rents them for tail-gate parties.

Our initial plan was to take a trip one way — pick up the truck in Toronto, drop it off in Hamilton. Easy. So, we booked our truck. They called last week to change it to a two-way trip. As incentive they reduced the price by 110$ and doubled the mileage to convince me. They also assured me that we would still have 24 hours with a truck.

But, as it turns out, the dealers are not connected to the distributors. On Friday a dealer called to confirm our booking — 4pm on Saturday to 9am on Sunday. I don’t think it is physically possible to move and return the truck in that window unless you don’t sleep or have an army of volunteers. The dealer told me to call the distributors to get it changed. It took me two hours to get through. They also don’t have hold or answering machines. An hour and a half of busy signals can be painfully discouraging. I finally got through and got a truck. 7pm Saturday to 7pm Sunday. Long story short, we moved all of our stuff this weekend.

This experience led me to wonder though, how some of these companies survive?  How is it that the left foot and the right foot can do different things, but still move in a forward direction? In this case, I think the simple answer is the brand. U-haul has trucks everywhere and who doesn’t recognize the black, white and orange branding?

When we were planning on moving the first company that we looked up was U-Haul and *click-click-click* our truck was booked. We waded our way through the patchwork customer service and arrived at an end result.  Granted, it was the result we were looking for, but the experience left quite a bit to be desired.

Next time I move (which hopefully won’t be for a while) I’m going to do a bit more research.

Pretty sure that’ll be the last time I use U-Haul.