The truth of dead people and storage

Someone once told me that every manager who stay in the game long enough will get one dead body. I don’t know what it says about me but I have had two.

The story of the first dead body-

Some time around 1995 I was working as the onsite maintenance at Space Bank in Pasadena. A wonderful facility 8.5 acres of old Navy base. As the summer started heating up the smell of dead rodent started getting pretty strong in the “W” building and as maintenance I started the hunt. From time to time a mouse will get into a unit so we kept a really potent poison in the ceiling. The mice go after the bate and die quite quickly. The poison dehydrates the rodent and you end up with a mummified Mickey that stops smelling.

As soon as you smell one you have to find it before the smell stops. With in 5 days I hadn’t found my mouse friend but the strange thing was the smell was getting stronger. I finally got to the point where we started cutting locks to track down the smell.

Three weeks later we have entered every space in that hallway with no luck. The summer temperatures are going up and the smell is getting worse. That is when a little luck solved the mystery.

During the day it was standard procedure to walk the grounds and check doors. On the Mini Storage side of the property we are looking for dummy locked doors and doors without locks. There was a large section of the property that was built into a industrial park. This side was 24 hour access and we didn’t have a need to check doors. Well fortunately or unfortunately one of the weekend crew checked the door to one of the industrial spaces that happened to back up to the building with the “W” hallway. Well the answer to the smell was laying half on a couch half on the floor in front of a space heater.

An industrial tenant who happened to have cancer had overdosed on his pain meds and had passes away in his shop. Why no one had not noticed he was missing can be put down to many reasons, but my belief was he had alienated himself from his family. We would not start looking for him till his rent came do.

Living in L.A. county does make for some interesting meetings. There were two ladies who were on the scene as coroners on the OJ Simpson Double Homicide. One spent a year on television at the trial the other one got to come to Space Bank and help us out. It was this lady who taught me how to get decomposing human out of cement. The secret is kitty litter lots and lots of kitty litter and a strong stomach. It took two weeks and a about 20 lbs of the litter. You lay it out then in the morning scrape it up. Repeat till the litter stays dry. I really hope I never have to do that again.

Scraping human de-comp, can that be put on a resume?

My desk continued

I found out how to get a clean desk and it was quite simple.  On Monday I started organizing things that did not belong on my desk.  By removing these Items I made a great step forward.   On Tuesday I started filing all of the paperwork that had built up.  This was a great step also, but it left the pile of real work left to take care of.  On Wednesday morning my boss calls me to inform me that we have a webinar that we need to attend at 1:00. Hey this could be a break from the cleaning!  Except my car it in the shop and there for he needs to come to my office so we can attend it together.  Ok game is on!  One hour later this is what my desk looked like.

The Webinar by the way was great.  If you get a chance to hear “The Hat Lady” speak on storage don’t miss it.  She really knows what she is talking about.

Now that the Webinar is over I need to crunch some serious numbers. Up stairs to the old records, bring down 2010 and 2011  and this is what my desk looks like.

Maybe I should just accept the fact that I am not a neat desk person.  I think I heard once that Benjamin Franklin was a messy desk person.  I think I have that reference somewhere... on my desk.

My desk does not understand me

I lost my desk! I left it right here in my office and when I turned around , Bam, it was gone.

The reality is that my desk gets lost from time to time. The past couple of weeks it seems that the desk is gone more than it is present. So here we go, tomorrow is Monday and I will find the top of the desk. My belief has always been a clean desk will help you stay organized in your day. I like to be organized and I hate having things slip through the cracks. So organized Monday is back. What I need to do is find a way that will keep the clutter off the desk during the week so when Friday comes I can see the desk top.

To my friends at AT&T

To my friends at AT&T:

The fact that you have job absolutely astounds me. What has happened to customer service. It is amazing that one of these “customer service experts” can say the words that sound like they are being helpful, but you know that four hours latter you will have to call again and start from scratch. By the end of my 36 hour journey into the world of AT&T service, the last rep. that I talked to says “Please hold while I call up your account….. Wow… you have made a few calls haven’t you”? My answer “Yes, but this call has nothing to do with the last 2 days of my life”. His response “ Thank God”.

My biggest complaint has nothing to do with the fact that they were unable to fix my problem in any timely manor. I am a reasonable man (at times). The fact that I was lied to time after time, caught them in their lies, and still they continued to lie. At one point I had a representative hang up the phone while I was in mid sentence. I called back to ask the supervisor to find out who that was, and after she told me that they do not keep records of which person talks to whom so she could not find out who hung up on me, she told me who was the last three techs who did do real work on my problem.

Oh well, I ramble, much like the supervisor at AT&T.

I think I will name my next aneurism after her.

What not to find in storage.

A tale from the past.

Many moons ago I was just starting out in my career in storage working for a wonderful business called Space Bank Mini Storage, in Pasadena California. I learned a lot working there, and many stories start “when I was working for Space Bank…”. It is sort of like when a red neck says “Hold my beer”.

When I was working at Space Bank one of the lessons I learned was the importance of locking up. Space Bank is this wonderful property just along the 210 freeway in Pasadena, Ca. It originally was the secret Naval Base in Pasadena. The property that Space Bank bought was 8.5 acres of old Navy buildings. The partnership who bought it converted each building one at a time into storage and over the first 10 years created a quite unusual storage facility.

When I came aboard, in the 90’s the procedures for closing up were well established. A half an hour before close one employee would walk the grounds making sure that all the hallways were locked and no one was inside. At a quick pace this could be done in about 20 minutes. It was common to come across at least one customer who had let time slip by and need reminded that we were about to close. “Excuse me but we are closing in five minutes please close up your space and head off the property”. This was all that was needed and most people would be gone before you finished your rounds. The people who trained me warned that on occasion there would be people who just wouldn’t leave. What they never warned me about was people who used storage for other than storage.

In my first couple of months at work I was doing my rounds telling folks it’s time to go and trying to get through the hallways in a timely manor. As I was trotting down the “G” hallway when I noticed a door cracked open. No big deal I thought , as I passed the door I opened it up to fin two “not so lovely people” engaged in a quite common sexual position that left nothing to the imagination. I looked at them and they at me and I simply said “ We are closing in five minutes and you close your unit and leave the property”. Unlike everyone else, they did not leave the property quickly. This gave me time to get back to the office and gather the remaining employees. As the couple finely left the property We stood lining the exit waiving good by….they did not waive back.

You never know what you will run across in storage.

down come the Lights!

20120107

The lights have come down, so the official celebration of Christmas is over here at Guardian.  It has been a good year here and it ended on a fairly high note, but it is still kind of sad when the lights come down and the decorations are put away. We had a nice look here at the house/office, but the nicer the look the longer it takes to bring it down. I am already thinking what can be done to top it next year.

Two nice things happened while bring down the lights, first I got a hand from my son and our scout master.  That really helped get the job done fast.  Second, was I had two different customers stop by the office while the lights were coming down say hi and dropped payments into the drop box.  This may not sound big, but a lot of the customers here got use to the last manager being here all the time and stopping to take payments or rent spaces.  I have a family and need to have some time for them and that is what days off are for.  It was very nice to have the customers not expect me to stop what I was doing to take payments.  Way to go guys!!

Lights were not the only thing done on this day off.  Here is the sad part of the day.  Five days a week I deal with storage, so what do I do this afternoon …clean out my storage!   Yes even storage manager must clean out and organize their own storage units.  So when you go to your storage facility with any complaints about your unit, bill, your needs please remember, we know what is going on already.  We to live with all the problems you have, the difference is we do the same thing for ourselves and then again with each of our tenants.  

The first day of the new system

Bob the Hedge Hog relaxes with a cup of joe, after entering payments all day.

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Ok, the first day with the new computer system did not go as smooth as I would have liked, but there were some extenuating circumstances. First lets remember it is the first day of the year and a lot of payments needed to be entered, and the auto pay has not been set up in the new system making all credit card payments be done by hand, and I have not seen this many checks in one day in a long time. Second I got to rent spaces on the first day of the year! That is a great way to start the year. Oh yeah, third, I don’t think I ever really finished training.

From 9:15 to 4:45 all I did was payments. This would be phone in credit cards, dropped off checks, dropped off cash, mailed in checks , auto pay credit cards and auto pay automatic draft. All of these which were treated like walk in payments. I now know how to process payments of all sorts and have gotten quite fast at it. After 5:00 I tried my hand at doing close out for the first time. Guess what, I did not balance. So here comes my second bonus of the day. I now know how to reverse a payment, move a customer out and how to reverse a move out of that customer. Another Geek moment happened today at this point. This new system (Site Link is the name, I have held off naming it in case I did not like it.) can do a complete reversal on a move out. This is really cool in the storage world. For 20 years if ever I moved a customer out by mistake (yes that happens) I would have to recreate the entire data base for that customer. This new site link program was find the right button and poof it is like it never happened. This came in really helpful today when I took a payment on a space then vacated it then realized , Hey maybe I shouldn’t charge them for the month after they moved out. One button they were back in the system, I could then reverse the payment and move them back out. Geeky stuff to you maybe, but to me I was Superman.

Moral of the story - After 9 hours of competitive payment entering ask your wife why you don’t balance 10 minutes later the answer was obvious and fixable.

This is what it sounds like outside my window.

January 1, 2012

At this point everyone on the net is saying “have a happy new year”. Where that might be all nice and true at this very moment I question why do I live in a storage facility.

This is a small facility, under 500 units, and as such there is not a large need for part time employees. Having days off is not real easy and this is one of those long weekends that I do not get very often. The negative about this is living on the property does not get you away from the grind going on outside your front door. Where was it written that to be more of a man your truck needs to be able to rattle bricks off of buildings. Sitting in my living room I have counted the same truck drive in and out of the property 5 time just by the sound. Oh well noisy truck owners need to move their stuff too. Friends, Please think about the people who live on site of your storage and turn down the radio and don’t rev that engine when you go in and out of the facility.