March 9, 2011 | Posted in:Corvettes, Travel Stories

The time I spend straightening out UHaul issues is time that I’m NOT spending earning cash toward this very admirable goal.

I enter all of the information about my truck, the car to haul, what I want to rent, and my personal data into the UHaul website. Everything works properly, so I should be fine, right?

Except there’s a problem more often than not.

The last time I was told “sorry, your truck + auto transporter + Corvette = epic brake fail” the person ringing me up had entered something wrong about the truck into the system. We fixed it after about 20 minutes of phone calls and my pointing out the correct facts about the truck. After driving to West Virginia in a surprise snowstorm, I wasn’t about to give up that easily.

Today was a totally different story. We showed up in the Detroit area to “import” a Corvette. After a 4-hour trip, booking the UHaul in advance, and even speaking to a customer service representative, I was denied again. Too much weight for the truck to handle with the auto transport and the car. Never mind that the Corvette was basically a frame on wheels (no engine, suspension, or other heavy stuff) and weighed probably less than half of its original weight. If the computer system won’t allow a certain combination, no amount of pointing out facts and logic to the local UHaul or their corporate offices will help. What is extra frustrating is that I was allowed to enter that same exact information on the online confirmation screen and didn’t get any indication that there would be problems on the other end. We got sent to another UHaul in the area with a lighter trailer that would work with our truck.

If something sounds easy enough, it probably isn’t.

The trailer in question was at the second location, but so was a host of computer system issues. It took over a hour to take care of things there, and if the manager hadn’t shown up to help, I probably would have had to swipe my credit card a third time for this rental. If that wasn’t frustrating enough, I had to scramble for a second form of ID because it was an out of state rental…which baffles me, considering we do most of our renting outside of Ohio and have never been asked for that before. It’s the first time in a long time that my George Costanza wallet with EVERYTHING helped rather than hurt.

Total time to resolve all of this: 2 hours. I wasn’t able to get any sort of refund for my troubles. Which is unfortunate, considering that those extra 2 hours will cause unloading the trailer to be delayed by a day. As much as I would like to be Superman, unloading cars is at least a three-person project and requires scheduling help – and NOT at 10:30 pm, which is when we would have gotten to our destination.

So, why is it that if I show up to my local UHaul rental store (a company store, not a franchise like the three places I mentioned earlier) and request an auto transport, I can get one without any problem?

If anybody from UHaul is reading this and thinking, “Well, I don’t know…” now you understand why a trailer of our own is such a good idea.

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