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.

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.

 

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

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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

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.

Time to head home

Woke up this morning to say our goodbyes, a bittersweet time.

 

 

The path out of town is not very straight. We first stopped off at the Hat for lunch, By far some of the best Pastrami on the planet. No photos, the pastrami did not last that long.

Next stop was Space Bank Mini Storage, We had a nice talk with my old General Manager Mike.  His claim to fame is that he knows everyone , and he will be the 2016 Tournament of Roses President. 

 

To say that it was a different place to work is an understatement. One of the owners is the founder of the Pasadena Museum of California Art.  So you never know what  you will see hanging around.

 

 

The office I started in.  It has had a face lift since I started. The original office was what was left over from the Navy. We upgraded to this configuration in 1998.  The oldest photo of the property hangs in the office.  The best guess is that this would be in 1950’s or early 60’s.

 

After that we stopped at Trader Joe’s. Once again no photos we were too busy shopping. Since Oklahoma Liquor laws are keeping Joe out of the state, we will stock up on 2 buck Chuck whenever we get near a TJ’s.

By this time we have hit the heart of rush hour traffic (which starts at 2:00pm and last till 8:00, 9:00 and sometimes 10:00 pm). It was not as bad as it could have been but 45 mph on a 5 lane highway was the top speed and a complete stop was quite often.

 

Traffic is not one of the things I miss.

 

 

Since we were moving slow I got a nice shot of the back of Vasquez rocks.  For you out there that may not know Vasquez Rocks is the famous location where Captain Kirk Defeated the Gorn Captain in the original Star Trek series. Also there have been thousands of westerns filmed out there.