The Gloves Are Off

Warehouse 13 is precisely NOT where I used to work. (Note the phrase “Use to work”) What a nice group of people who are getting the crap kicked out of them. 

 

 Mid—States seemed like a really nice place with some decent people who worked there, but Mid—States was not a company all on its own.  They are a subsidiary of a larger company called Ches  a peak.  (and yes there is a reason to not type their name correctly).  The first reason is they are very protective of their name and second they have some really big jerks working the mid management team.  I never thought a company that big could get there making dumb decisions.  Most likely there has been a turnover in some level of management. I say this because a lot of the decisions being sent down are every modern shortsighted and money hungry.  The best model for business, in my opinion, is to build customer loyalty with great products and great customer service. To treat your customers with contempt and to belittle your employees and think that is the way to motivate and increase sales is insane. Since I do not want to be associated with this kind of business model, I left. 

With that rant done, let’s get on with the real world. 

We have moved again! The house we were living in was sold and we needed to find a new place.  So in one weekend we packed everything we had out of storage packe it into the car and van and moved while volunteering at the Iron Thistle Fair.

Scouts are helpful

Having your belongings in your cart,even for one weekend is kind of scarry.

 

 

 

 

 

Now we are back in the outskirts of Yukon staying with Scout Master Chuck and family.  It is a very nice place and very comfortable. Oh did I mention it just went up on the market.  Yeah it seems like we will just keep jumping house to house helping people sell their homes.

 

 The latest project to help the sale along was fixing a window sill, while the tornado sirens were going off. I know God has a plan and I trust that it is good and beneficial. It will be fun to look back on this time of our life and map out the road that God has us on. To understand why we were in certain places at certain times and to see how God worked through our situation. 

So what are we doing instead of working? Well looking for work is a top concern, but there is so much more.  Bobby and Jordie got married at the Myriad Gardens.

 

 The wedding was wonderful and they took off a week later for a honeymoon in So. California.  Linda and I have been helping Chuck prep the house for sale.

 

 

 

 

 Joshua and Steven went off to his Ordeal for the Order of the Arrow. 

Troop 300 celebrated a new Eagle Scout.

 

  I got to put a team together to go receive a Cub Scout who bridged into Boy Scouts.

 

 Karate, Church, Family time and Sleep round out the rest of the time.

Oh and just for fun we picked up the newlyweds from the airport in a hail storm. 

 

We had to make a few pit stops to avoid the bigger Hail. (I don't eat McDonalds and we didn't need gas, but the cover kept the hail off the car).

Life is not setteled yet, but it is interesting.

Change is in the air

There is a time for a change and that time is now.  First Change will be the name of this blog.  I am leaning toward “The Life of Bob” and that will be the working title, but if you have an idea I will be open.  

Now for the rest of the story.

Two weeks ago (that would be 3/18/13) the day before my 50^th birthday, Storage Management Associates, the management company my old boss hired at the first of the year sent an area manager to Yukon Oklahoma to relieve Linda and myself from our servitude to the company. In other words we got fired. Ok not really a big deal I didn’t trust SMA anyway. Now I will let you know I do not hold any real grudge with SMA I could tell from the beginning it was never going to work.  The style of business that they do and what I have been so successful with are diametrically opposed.  So in the big scheme of things it was not a big surprise. 

Now on that day they fired us they also gave us 7 days to move out, and that did give Linda and I a fairly blue night.  Remember Tuesday is my Birthday and on my birthday for the past 6 years I have baked cookies and given them away last year I did 21 dozen.  This year I really wanted to make 50 dozen so Linda jumped in and started baking. Hey job or no job my 50^th birthday only comes once. That is when we got the call from a real close friend in California that her husband had passed away.  No matter how bad your problems seem there are always people whose problems are worse.  Anyway God is the one who is ultimately in control and he will lead us where he wants.

Tuesday happens and since Linda and I no longer have Jobs we could spend the whole day handing out Bob day cookies. The actual name of my Birthday is “Unofficial International Bob Day” I have networked this day with friends of mine to reach people on six continents.  It is crazy to think on March 19^th people all over the world are making and giving away cookies just to bring a smile.

 

 

Armed with 50 dozen cookies in 100 Red solo cups Linda and I gave cookies away from the north side of Oklahoma City through Yukon and ended up in El Reno.  We spread as much joy as possible and promoted the Military Prayer Group of Yukon an organization that prays for our men and women who serve our armed forces.  Bob Day ended very well.

 

Wednesday we woke up and started packing like crazy.  With the help of our friends lead by the unstoppable Joyce Roper

 

 

 we moved our 300 Square foot storage and our 200 square foot shop to 5 Star Storage owned buy one very honest and honorable man Rick Opitz.

 

Thursday I put my wife on an airplane to California to be with her best friend at the funeral of her husband.   Joyce and Samantha Matthews continued to move wood and boxes from Guardian to Five Star and Started packing up the house.

 

Friday we had more help come in and continue packing the house up. Once again Joyce led the charge and kept me focused.  Without my wife I can get bogged down in the little things it is nice to have someone step in and help.

 

 Saturday night Danielle and her son Gavin came by and packed like crazy. It was the final touch that made me feel ready for the morning.

Saturday was the big move our son Bobby brought the Red Neck army over to help.

 

My dad stopped by and lent a hand packing cleaning and moving.  My body had taken as much abuse as it could stand and it was nice to have the help. Saturday also brought the rain. So it looked like it was going to be a soggy move but Pastor Ron Rasmussen from Christ Church of Yukon brought a line of pickup trucks and we had the house cleared in no time. At one point it felt like we had so much help that I could easily lose control. God is so good he blessed us with an overflowing cup.

Monday I did some cleanup work in storage and ran errands around town. Then spent a long night at scouts explaining what just happened to Linda and me.

Tuesday I started work with John Miller doing some work on a home he was refurbishing. I also received a call from a company to come in for an interview.  Then I spent a long night at Joshua’s Karate class explaining what happened to Linda and me.

Wednesday I came in late to work on the house because of the Job interview.  Then I received a call that afternoon offering me the job.

Thursday I never made it to the house due to the fact it took most of the day to fill out employment paperwork and take a drug test. I then had the great pleasure of picking up my wife from the airport.

Friday I spent the day working for John and the evening with my family.

All that to bring us to today, we are staying with friends, my new jobs starts Monday,  we are blessed with more friends than you can imagine, tomorrow is Easter and God is good… all the time.

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.

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

Crime hit a mini storage again, are you sruprised

I arrive to work this past Monday thinking this should be a quiet day, as usual I was wrong.  Like I normally do I dive the site.  Just a quick pass to make sure things are looking like they should, not like this.

 

What is missing in this picture?  Ok I know that’s not a fair question because I don’t have a picture of what it should look like, so let me fill you in.  The picture here shows one of the vacuums at the car wash. If you look down to the bottom left side of this one there is a metal bar. That bar should be across the coin box at the middle of the machine and locked into place.   At 5:15 Monday morning two idiots in a repo-tow truck dive past three cameras and cut the lock off the Vacuum but first they take some kind of stick (looked Like a weed eater) and knocked down and stole a couple of hundred dollar camera.  Now here is the good part the second lock on a Vacuum is hidden and almost impossible to break.

 

 

 The two idiots tried to pry the coin box out but did not get very far. Seven minutes later off they drive. I would normal give the perpetrators a clever name, but after very little deliberation I realize that for their lack of originality, their lack of fortitude to see their crime through and the fact they destroyed a camera that will take around $200 to replace in their attempt to steal $16 in quarters, I will not grace these two with a cool nick name.  They have discredited themselves, made a mockery out of petty crimes and sullied the good name of Repo Men all over the world.

A busy day

Sometimes even good people make me shake my head.  It was last Sunday and I was trying to get a lot of things done in a short amount of time.  After church I needed to to do three things; one, pick up my son from the Boy Scouts,  meet the new employee at Access to give him keys  and directions and finely get to my parents’ house to meet my wife for lunch.  At 12:30 I hit the house and dug up the keys for Andrew. By 12:30 I was at Access getting ready for Andrew.  At 12:45 I receive a call from Joshua that he is about 20 minute away from the pickup point. 1:00 Andrew shows up to work and I give him the run down on what to do on a Sunday. 1:15 I arrive at the pickup to get Joshua (he has been camping all weekend and the odor is quite interesting).  At 1:20 we are back at Guardian so Josh can have a quick shower then off to my parents.  This is when I see this.

The hand rail to the office door is knocked apart. Notice the scratch marks on the cement.  They go out about half way accross the walk path after the pipe was broken from the ground.  This was a powerful hit  Interesting fact about this is the bushes that the rail is up against, was not hit which leaves a very narrow target.   The cameras once again were on the fritz at the time of the hit and run and we never got a shot of the car, but we could see the rail get moved in one angle.  At 1:13 the rail jumps then 7 minutes later I pulled up.  No note, no tape, no nothing.  Monday afternoon (after Linda has made a police report) a customer calls and confesses to the accident.  Well at least we know where to send the bill. 

Now what did I do, simple. I took this picture, let Josh get cleaned up, when to my parents, eat a fine luch..... oh yes told Linda about "her" handrail over coffee and dessert.  Timming is everything.

Don't Forget

Well if you have been following this blog you know how much I Lovvvvvvveeeeeee  looking for employees.   So when I got finished with the interviews I was a very happy Bob. Too much of my chagrin  it is not but a short month latter I am not so happy, and here is why…

  

Hey Michael! Do you know what you forgot?  To come to work!  Yes, that’s right Michael just stopped coming to work. Well that is true but there is more to the story.  Michael interns at a local sports radio station and has been given the opportunity to do bigger and more exciting things. I wish him the best and hope he gets his own show soon. Till then we will just have to see how Michael 2.0 works out. Andrew  will be filling out paperwork tomorrow.

 Now for the other news that’s not fit to print.

So for the third time this year I am trying to set up an auction.  As of yesterday we were heading for a nice auction then today happened.  

Linda has been doing a great job keeping the paperwork straight,  so today she was going through the Yukon Reviews Saturday’s paper to cut out the legal posting when she noticed there was no legal posting.  That is right; they only ran the notice for one week not two.  That just scrapped the auction for another 16 days.  When you pay $78 to the paper you hope that they know what they are doing.  Well that didn’t stop them from putting a big monkey wrench into our auction.   So on to plan “B”. 

The Yukon Review has offered to pay us back the$78 and run the notice for the next two weeks.  Linda is reprinting the notices with the new date.  We will be mailing them tomorrow.  The new auction date will be next month on the 4^th.  

 If we can get the legales posted on time.

The Return of the Stooges

When Hollywood remakes a movie they keep the characters it is just the actors that change.  Well the same can be said of the storage world.   Today I had a visit from the stooges.  Now this was not the same actors that visited me over at Guardian but these actors played the pats quite well.

I spent the day at Access Storage with Don and Debbie (two of the big hitters in my world).   We did some work we did some planning and we witnessed some poor decisions being made.

When I arrived at work it was around 11:00 am. and I was there to relieve John who had opened the store.  Debbie had opened with John, but when I pulled in there was three cars in the parking so I picked the spot next to the odd car out, a piece of crap Dodge.  Now if it was taken care of it could be a nice old car, but I doubt that it will survive that long.

So skip ahead an hour and Moe shows up, stops in the office to explain that his car had broken down and he and his buddies were going to get it running.  I look out and Larry is now opening up the hood.   Ten minutes later Shemp shows up.  This is about the time I notice what they are doing.  The Stooges have 2 ½ gallons of gas and they are pouring some into the carburetor. Now they must know that gas has some combustible properties because at this moment Larry places a fire extinguisher on top of the engine.  Let me ask you a question if the engine catches on fire where is, the last, place you want the fire extinguisher?  I would think you would not want it at ground zero, but that is where it stayed.  Oh did I mention Moe and Larry are smoking cigarettes … and Shemp has a pipe.  If you know the substance you are working with is flammable why are you lighting up around it. 

This is the moment I remember where my car is, compaired to this insanity.  Up I jump, grabbing my keys, and I am out the door.  As I pass Moe I ask “gasoline”? He says “Uh-huh”.  I look at his car and say “In the carburetor”?  Again he says “Uh-Huh”.  “Great” I say “I’ll just be moving my car now”, and I do.

Now that my car is in a safe place, on the other side of the property, I sit back in the office.  Debbie and I spend the next houror so watching the slap stick comedy, but to no avail, they can not blow up the car for our entertainment.  Neither can they start the car so they give up and drive off. Leaving the gasoline next to the car along with the fire extinguisher.  They seem to be giving mixed singles here.

 Latter Moe does come back to tell us that he will have a buddy come tow it tonight ….  I sure hope its Curly. I liked Curly better than Shemp.

The Crap Hit the Fan Today

Can you guess what this is?

　



If you said “Gee Whiz Bob, that looks like the start of a Police Report”. I would say “go to the head of the class. I would then make fun of you for saying Gee Whiz.

This was a tough weekend for me. I had some situations happen that made me really check my gut reaction. Well Monday is here and it is time to go make things happen at the new storage facility… or is it? When I woke up this morning I had no idea that two very low life’s had broken into 18 different units or vehicles last night. I can’t show pictures of the effected units or even tell you how it was done. (We need to remember the privacy of our tenants). Now is the time to talk to about how to protect your belongings while they are in storage.

First do not let everyone know that you are using storage. The fewer people who know is best. If you use a moving company pack in unmarked boxes. Instead of writing mom’s good china, or Dad’s antique guns just mark the box with color so that you now all blue marked boxes go to dad’s study and green is for the kitchen.

Next Pack your unit to the gills, I mean fill every space possible. When someone opens the door it should be a solid wall of unmarked boxes and they should say “Whoa! I do not even want to take the time to figure this out”.

Go spend some money on a good lock. The cheapest lock you should look at is a Disk Lock Spend 10 to 20 dollars. Every space that was broken into last night was a standard lock. With the exception of on that was a school gym locker. The truth is locks keep honest people honest, so use a lock that will keep the most people honest.

Finally get your self some insurance. Self storage companies do not carry insurance on your property. You can sue a storage company for your losses but you will lose. When you sign a contract with a storage company you are in an agreement that the company will not carry any kind of policy for your stuff. Have I made myself clear No Self Storage Provider Will Cover You Stuff With Any Kind Of Policy. Now some Companies will offer a pay with your rent Policy, these are not bad policies so look closely at them, but they are not the provider or the insurer they are only a go between. The big point make sure you are covered with some kind of policy. Check your homeowner or renter policy to see if they cover you. No mater what it is your responsibility and no one else.