The Smell Is Oh So Special

Now I have been having so much fun with the car wash for the past two months.  The sumps have all started backing up, at first it was one at a time then the whole thing started acting up.  In fact, in the month of December I have cleared clogs five times.

Now I have explained how much I enjoy working on the sumps with the smell, the slime, the smell, and the smell. In fact last Sunday I had the extra fun of teaching Andrew how to clear a clog.  What bothered me on Sunday was the fact that that it was the second time for the Auto bay to clog up in three days. Things were going from bad to worse for the drainage system.  That Monday I called American Sanitation and tried to set an appointment to get the sumps clean.  The answer was “Well maybe, we can get there by Thursday!” I heard myself saying “That’s cool we get it done when we can” While my brain was exploding in my skull and leaking out my ears. Luckily we did not Back up in any of the stalls for the rest of the week.  We did not get the cleanout done till Friday, but boy did those guys earn their pay.  Two guys show up early Friday morning with a large empty Tanker and started cleaning out the manual bays

 

These guys worked through the wind, the temperature, and the smell. I never realized just how much crap comes off cars, trucks, and whatever else that fits into a wash bay.

 

Once a bay was clean they opened it up to the customers and moved on to the next, at least for the first four bays.  That’s when they realized that our bays were so full that their tanker truck would not hold all the crap.  They had to leave and dump their tank and come back for the last three bays. 

 

The last surprise was when they started working on the main sump.  We found that there was a major clog somewhere in a two foot section of pipe that was deeper in the crap soup than anyone could or wanted to try to reach. (That included me).  This is when the manager came up with the idea of building up some pressure in the tanker then hit that clog with all that pressure at once. This sucked the clog out faster than anything.  Think of a giant plunger and you might get an idea of the sound that clog made coming out.  Now what was in that clog?  well no one will ever know.  I like to think it was something dead.

 

All and all it was well worth all the trouble to get the car wash back up and running.

Now for somrthing completely diffrent

Here is a quick fun fact! We got power to our new sign

 

So what is so fun about this fact you might ask

 

The answer is in the 21 years that I have been working in storage I have asked electricians a thousand times (maybe 10 times in total) to add an electrical outlet to the outside of buildings signs and polls.  In 21 years they always forget to do such a little thing and I end up running extension cords all over the property.

If you look to the bottom of this sign, this magnificent most tricked out sign I have ever been blessed to work with, you will see an electrical outlet.  Such a small thing and such a large time saving, frustration removing gift. 

 

And in other news ...Yukon gets over run with wild turkeys!  Ok, ok, it was only two turkeys but this was in town by the post office.  Not exactly what I expected.

The Lights 2012 night one

The first night at the Christmas Lights at the Park was last night and it went pretty well.  The night started out warm enough but by 10:00 it did get cold.  Once again I got out of the cold by donning the Rudolf costume and running around for three hours acting like an idiot, but I got a lot of smiles from kids and adults alike.

 

Now not everyone was as warm as I was. Linda and Josh had to find their own places to get out of the wind.

 

The City of Yukon goes all out to make this the best light display and every year you find new lights.

 

 

As I said before if you get the chance to come down to Yukon and see the lights make it happen, you will not regret it. If you come on the 20^th be real nice to Rudolph.

Wow its Christmas and all that!

For you that do not live in the Yukon area, let me invite you to swing by if you can.  The city of Yukon puts on one of the best Christmas light shows I have ever seen. This year there should be over 4 million lights. Yes that is over 4,000,000 or you could say there is a bunch.   It looks something like this…

 

 

 

 

 

On Thursday Linda, Josh and I will be volunteering at the park to collect donations. Last year we looked like this

 Josh was cold…

 (could not find a picture of Josh... Man that is odd)

 

Linda was cold…

 

I was Rudolf…

 

Oh Yea...

Something I totally skipped on and it is important.  The sign company came back the third time and finished the sign installation.

 

I had planned on making a lot of hoopla about this, but as in life things happened. 

Now some of you may say “yes it is a nice sign, but is it really necessary to have such a big flashy sign as this for a mini storage”.  I would say yes!  The bigger and flashier the sign the better it is for the mini storage.  As it sits now the sign wasn’t up for two hours and someone came in the office, said hey I was driving by and saw your sign, and then they rented a space. The sign doesn’t even have power yet.  That is just plain cool.

 

Time For Another Auction

For the last two months we have been working on another auction.  Between the two stores we had a good dozen units going into auction status.  16 days ago when we sent the ad into the paper we only had 6 left.  That is not bad. Six units that paid up, or paid and moved. Paid and Moved is when a customer Knows they are never going to pay off their bill, so they offer 51% and get their stuff off the property.  The average that I try to achieve is 33 cents on the dollar so if I can get a bad unit emptied and still make 50 cents on the dollar I call that good. 

All good things do have to come to an end .  When we reach the cut lock day if the customer has not taken care of their debt then it goes to all or nothing. We had 6 units that had reached that point. 
One week out Linda got one of her units to pay up. That’s nice 5 units a good number for an auction. Then another unit pays up and I start thinking if Linda keeps this up we may lose this auction….. Let’s think about this…..  Linda gets people to pay up at full price, which is better than a pay and move and a lot better than 33 cents on the dollar at auction.

So we ride for a while with four units, not a great number for an auction, but livable.  Then it happened, the two units that were going to auction at my property both were paid off the night before the auction.  $1000.00 in the bank and we don’t have to take the risk of going to auction.  I could really get use to this.  But… this leaves only two units left.

Tuesday morning I get up and go have breakfast with the men’s group at church. When I get back home the phone starts to ring. People want to know what is left for today.  Two units we tell them, and then the call happens.  One more unit is coming in to pay up.  With 50 minutes to go one of our tenants comes in under the wire. We are down to one. At this point I am rooting for our last tenant to magically appear and pay off… it did not happen.

10:00 comes and we have 6 bidders and one unit. Oh yes!  the whistler came back and actually behaved himself.  It looked like this from my point of view.

 

And it looked like this from their point of view.

 

The end story is that the one and only unit that went up for sale today brought in $190.00 and the whistler did not stay in the bid for very long.

 

In one way it was a very lonely bid sheet. On the other hand we made bank through this auction process and the on unit  went for 55 cents on the dollar. Not bad all the way around.

Here is Job Security

I have had a fairly quiet day Tuesday.  There was enough free time that I got the commission report done early and straightened the office a bit.  Around 3:00 in the afternoon I went out to dump the trash at the Car Wash and found this.

 The walls were totaled as bad as the floors

 

It appears that some guys who have been working on the roads used the car wash to clean up.  Bay one was filled with tools and gloves, bay two had uniforms and boots, and I am not sure what was in bay three but it too was filled with road tar and gravel.  Now I do not blame these guys for making such a mess, in fact I want them to come back.  Providing a place to get things clean is what we do.  Not to mention they were out in the bays for 30 to 45 minutes.  Constant use of our bays for that much time means they spent some good money with us.  (after pulling in the cash on Wednesday, bay 1 & 2 totaled more than $50  in quarterdcombined)

The sad fact what took them 45 minutes to use took me 2 ½ hours to clean up.  I wish there was a way to do that kind of cleaning without leaving that kind of cleanup. 

 

Now a fact I knew was reinforced ,  within two minutes of getting the last bay clean a truck pulls in a uses the car wash.  The fact is a clean car wash is what people want  and the cleaner we keep it the more they will use it.

 

Look Who is back

 

Two days later and look who’s back.  Pole, hole digging equipment and cement were all present this time. They even had a crane to lift the pole into position. When I looked out my window I could even see some markings of the UCIC workers who marked the utilities. I placed a call a call to Deb and informed her that that the sign guys are back and they are working.  This made everyone happy.  I figured as long as I did not show my face or interrupt in any way, we might get a poll today.

 

I did sneak out from time to time to see how things are going, but I keep my distance. It takes them most of the day to get the poll up.  By the time that John and I were pulling money from the Car Wash the cement was just starting to go into the hole.  I asked John if it would be ok for me to go to the foreman and tell him that I just got off the phone with my boss and he said the pole is in the wrong spot. John thought for a moment and said lets just wait till they are gone and then we can move the poll to some other part of the property.  There is something wrong with us that makes us want to poke the tiger with a stick. 

After they left I went to get a close up of the work. Remember the underground utilities markings that I was seeing thismorning? Well the markings were no where near the hole.

Here is a bit of interesting facts, or a story of timing.

An e-mail confirmation has been sent to you. 

 

Today I noticed a large pole sitting on a truck out by the street. It looked like this…

 

Since I did not know that the new sign was coming in, I went out to check out what was happening.  I met the closest thing to a foreman. He introduced me to the boss, who did know all sorts of facts.  The sign is going to look great. Well I left the group and called the office.   I got a hold of Debbie and started asking too many questions. (I have a way of doing that, in fact I really need to do something about that).

After talking to Debbie and Don for a few minutes, we needed to check if they were digging in the right spot.  You would think when they get to this point everyone would know exactly where the pole is going.  In the six weeks since the check was signed I have never seen anyone on property measuring or checking anything, so double checking may not be a bad thing.  Well get a load of this story. 

 

I started asking questions about the location and the foreman guy started acting a little weird.  One he would not stop working when I asked if we were in the right spot. Even the fact that where they were digging was busting up the concrete.  My statement to them was that my boss thought it was going to be on the south end of that parking area.  He tells me I should talk to his boss, so I went to talk to his boss.  Guess what, he wasn't there anymore he was on his way to another town. I make it back to the foreman and he has his guys filling in the hole and packing up.  What is up I asked. And he said that since I didn’t want the pole here that he was canceled the cement and they were leaving. I asked if a 20 ft difference was worth canceling the job over and he jumps into my face.  Very strange moment, this guy moves in pretty dam close to my face and yells- do you know if there is a gass line under the ground, well do ya! ( I would love to say I calmly answered him back) I raised my voice and say that as a matter of fact I was not a gas line expert and I had no idea what was under the ground.  So he and his guys left.

 

 

Jump ahead 3 hours,  it just so happens that the guy who marked the utility lines for this project is a tenant of ours and he stopped by the property on a storage run.  Well John and I got to talking about this incident and showed him were they were digging.  It comes to light that where they ordered the survey was at the complete opposite side of the entire strip mall.

 

  These guys were digging in an area that was not marked and were very close to some high pressure gas lines. If they had continued to dig they could have been fined a bunch of money or hit a line and blown themselves apart. Tomorrow morning I will be letting my bosses know.  My wife Linda pointed out that sometimes God works through conflict to save us from even worse fates.

Robert Reynolds
321 S CEMETERY RD
YUKON, OK 73099-6441
United States

What happened to Bob

Boy, am I off my game.  For the last two days I haven’t swept a space, clean a car wash bay and my typing speed has been cut in half. 

 

 What could have happened on Wednesday to make such a change in my performance?

 

I had surgery to help my ulna nerve to get it back into place.  As far as surgeries go, not so bad. As far as scars go …  well it’s a good one.

It also makes blogging kind of hard.

The quick version is Nerve blocks are good, a wife to take care of you is good and being able to go back to work the next day is good.  Also being able to call in Andrew to help keep the place looking good was real nice.

Patience can be a pain in the ass

Here is a nice picture of the kiosk that sits in front of the office. For the past month and a half, the printer has been on the fritz.  It started one day when a customer made a payment and the receipt kept printing.  I had to go out and turn the printer off we had already rolled about 20’ of paper out of the machine.  From this point on the printer stopped working.

I called the kiosk company and quickly found out they have field techs that can be on site instantaneously.   The reality is I am their field tech because they do not send one out… So the origanal phone call goes something like this.

Me: the printer does not work.

Them: what is it doing?

Me: not working.

Them:……………

Me: Uh, there is no power.

Them: What was it doing before the power stopped?

Me: Continuous printing, over 20 feet of paper without printing anything you can read.

Them: It is a communication cable problem.

Me: But there is no power.

Them: We are sending you a new cable call us when arrives next week.

Me: But the printer is not working now.

A week goes by and the communication cable shows up, so I call the company and they politely (they are very nice people) tell me to install the cable and to call them back. 30 minutes latter I finally get the cable in.  This cable is held in by 20 + zip ties. I call the company back and they say…

Them: Now turn on the power.

Me: The power switch is on.

Them: Can you see the test page?

Me: ….No… there still is no power.

Them: We will send you a new printer.

Me: And that will fix the power issue.

Them: And we will send you a new power supply.

Me: Thank you

Them: It will arrive in about a week.

It did arrive in a week but I was on vacation that week so two weeks later I call the company and say I have the printer now what? 

At this point I am going to stop typing the dialog because the installation of the new printer and new power supply took a couple of hours and several calls.  It was not very fun and there was a whole bunch of zip ties that had to be cut.  This is the point I realized they did not send any zip ties to replace they ones that had to be cut.  Duct Tape to the rescue.

This time when they asked for the power to be turned on it did come on. And the printer started spitting out 20 to 30 ft. of paper.  Almost four weeks have gone by and we are back to the original problem.  I stand out at the kiosk for another hour while they run test to no avail.  The answer is “We need to do some research on this”.  The following Monday I call back to follow up. “Hey guys it has been a couple of days have we figured out anything on this printer situation”.  The answer is that I need a specialist to call me and to work this problem.  The truth is I have needed as specialist to come over to the property and fix this printer four and a half weeks ago…..  Wednesday of last week I got a call and was talking to the specialist and he loaded drivers and reloaded drivers, he tested the printer and he retested the printers. He even would hang up the phone because what he was trying was going to take a while then he would call back and test the printer and retest the printer. Finally in the end 5 and ½ weeks later I have a working printer.

 

This is a look at the final days testing of the printer aftermath.  I have seen the inside of that machine just a little too much.

Cement is not that hard

It has taken me a few days to get back in the saddle here at the storage, but that is the natural way of things when you are gone for a week.  Monday was kind of rough but not unbearable. Tuesday was just a repeat of Monday.  Wednesday now there was a day. If ever there was a day that was needed it was Wednesday.

If I haven’t mention there is a donut shop moving in across the driveway from my office.  The construction has been moving along, but not as fast as I thought it would.  Well today was cement day at the donut shop.  The cement team showed up and immediately pissed me off.  The punk kid with the tattoos pulls up with the company truck and backs it up to the back door of the donut shop effectively making his walk to the door as close as possible and simultaneously blocking off three of the four parking spaces and blocking a tenant from being able to leave.  I simply knocked on the back door of the donut  shop and stated that this was not ok and could we move the tuck into the closest parking space.  The boss man whom I was talking to never got a chance to answer because punk kid with the tattoos explodes like I just kicked his dog stomps out the door and moves the truck to the front of the property.  Ok that will work too.

Later I got a nice shot of the team and I got to thinking this Mini Storage sits behind a car wash with a small parking lot that sits behind another building and a lot of strange crap happens here.

So later we notice that this team has three people, one is the boss man, two is the punk kid with the tattoos and three is the kid that does all the work.  I hope I am wrong but every time I looked out the window  boss man and punk kid with tattoos are talking and smoking and the kid who does all the work is …well…working….and smoking.  Some things stay the same. 

Toward the end of the day Kid that does all the work was by himself cleaning up and was seconds from getting a personal visit by me, because he was washing the cement off of the tools in the middle of the parking lot.  This is going to be a crappy mess that I will end up cleaning up if I don’t say something now. 

 

Before I can get out the door the company truck pulls up and I think maybe this is the moment that the boss man will do something boss man like.  Fat chance him and punk kid with the tattoos stand next to the kid who does all the work and start to talk….and smoke. At this point I am going to go out and say something but I have to stop laughing at the stupidity of this all. Out of nowhere this older gentleman comes up with a hard bristle push broom and starts cleaning the parking spaces the cement guys never notice and continue to stand in the way. With the fact that two people are standing in his way and a third person goes and finds more stuff to clean cement off of. This guy actually does a real good job making the parking lot look good.  I may have just seen the owner of the donut shop for the first time.

Some times I wash I could afford a full time photographer to follow me around because when the moments happen that would make the best photos I am usually staring in disbelief at what I am seeing.