Cottleston Pie

Derek's bad UHaul experience this past September (U-Haul: The New Bane Of My Existence) was no suprise to me. I figure I'll document here and now my own impressions from experience. And it'll be nice if in a few years or so I find this dated and no longer accurate.

I remain amazed at the effectiveness for the UHaul brand: a clever name and good advertising. UHaul hasn't gone downhill. My observation is that they've been at the bottom of the hill for about 10 years. They'll generally charge you more than competitors for equivalent or worse product along with mediocre-at-the-very-best service. I've a bunch of experiences of my own as well as hearing those of others over the past decade. But UHaul still seems to be the first and favored call for most people. I've had good experiences with Hertz-Penske, Rider, and Budget. In my most recent experience with Budget (August 2004), the people that were supposed to return the truck I needed didn't. So, the Budget guys drove a bigger, available truck from the other side of the city and gave it to me at the local location at the same price as my reservation for the one-size smaller truck. Exactly the type of great service that UHaul wasn't going to do for Derek.

Monday before Christmas, I went to Bluebonnet Station, the USPS Post Office for 78758, to mail four Priority Mail packages. I took a magazine that I'd just started because, based on past experience, I imagined my wait would be probably be an hour or so. Amazingly, I was done in the post office within ten minutes, including doing my hand addressing on the Priority Mail address labels. They have new Automated Postal Center (APC) units which are essentially like the ATM for postal transactions, which is great.

Because it was busy, there was a postal worker standing next to the machine helping people quickly navigate the touch screens. That was both a good and bad thing. Generally, it was helpful in moving things along, but I wanted to understand which button I was pushing and why because if a mistake were made, I'm sure I'd later be told caveat emptor and that it was my fault, not the postal employee standing there advising me, for not taking responsibility for the buttons that I was pressing. This was going through my head at the time and a bit awkward as the employee seemed to wonder why I was so pokey and wouldn't just press the button he was telling me to press. I was scanning the screen, and I'm no speed-reader, to double-check his directions.

There seems to be some sort of Bermuda-triangle for Priority Mail between Virginia and Austin. The Louisiana triangle? The Tennessee triangle? My cousin and I mailed each other packages that same day, the 19th. We also both mailed packages to Maine. All packages to Maine arrived by the 24th (6 mail days) or well before. Her package to me arrived the 27th (7 mail days). Mine to her was not delivered until the 28th (8 days). Unimpressive.

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible."
 — A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

On Friday a week ago, I got a call from security at work: "your car has been involved in an accident in the parking lot." As I descended the stairs, I had an unpleasant guess as to what happened, and, it turned out, I was right.

Before coming into the office building that morning, I'd sat in my car for a few minutes listening to a radio news item about hurricane Rita. Since the engine was running with the AC on, I'd shifted into neutral. Did I remember to put on the parking brake (aka emergency brake)?

As I gazed out at the parking lot, I saw the answer was "probably not," since my car wasn't where I'd parked it. Okay, so it rolled somewhere. I looked around, but couldn't see it. Security had said that they had someone at the accident site. So I looked around for a security person in a tan shirt or a security vehicle. I had an unpleasant feeling as I wandering into the neighboring lot and finally found my car, about, maybe 100 yards (90 meters) away.

My car had managed to skirt by some cement parking stops to cross into the next lot. Then it had hit a minivan which deflected it into a tree trunk, where it had finally come to rest. Thank goodness for the tree. If it hadn't been there, it would have rolled down into a large, ~4 foot (1.3 m) deep, drainage ditch. That would have been ugly. The tree didn't even leave a scratch.

Oh, and my car did an about-face on its journey, facing the opposite direction when it stopped. (My green route on the map doesn't contemplate how that happened...)

The owner of a the minivan was eventually located and came out and joined the security guard and I at the scene. She was a Vietnamese woman who worked in the same building and seemed a bit mystified by the whole event.

Fortunately, the damage to her minivan was minor since my car's bumper had hit it right in the middle of the front bumper at an angle. (It was good our bumpers matched hight! If either had been a big SUV or pickup, it all would've been worse.) The front bumper cover would clearly need replacing, but that was probably it. My own car's damage was worse because the corner of the bumper had hit the minivan, so the side panel had been scratched and bent such that it affected my opening the driver's side door.

The security guard started explaining the situation to her: we should exchanges insurance info; we could call APD (Austin Police Dept) if we wished but it was on private property and they might fill out a report, if they sent out anyone at all, but that was likely to be it; he would be filing his own paperwork which would be available shortly in case we or our insurance companies wanted it.

At this point, I respectfully took control because it was bad enough without eating up a whole day. I gave her a copy of my insurance card and didn't take her insurance info -- it was clearly entirely my fault. I said we shouldn't call APD because it was a waste of time (back in ~2000 someone ran into me in a parking lot, and after waiting a long time for APD, an officer finally showed up and gave us a blue form to fill out ourselves and mail in for statistics only; the driver that ran into me didn't take responsibility and I ended up paying for my own repair).

I immediately drove across the street to my insurance agent to set the wheels in motion to fix this little mess. Turns out that I should have taken her contact info because my insurance company needed it to call her and tell her to get her car fixed such that they'd pay. It wasn't a big mistake. I just drove back to the office and called my agent back with the info.

This past week, I had my car fixed by Rebreu Body & Frame again. And that all worked out well again.

As I was inspecting my car, I noticed a large-ish dent on the rear passenger side and also some small ripple-like-dents right behind the rear wheel well on that same corner. I've no idea when that happened, though it had to have been after my little run-in with Jesus last October. I can't imagine I would have missed the dents if Rebreu had failed to fix them back then. The dents also probably didn't occur during this accident (though there's the mystery of exactly how my car turned itself around).

I had Gene at Rebreu look at the dents. At first take, he thought it looked serious, like something had hit my car a lot harder than, say, a car door, and that my car would need a body-pull to fix structural damage. But further inspection revealed to him that there didn't seem to be any such damage. There was no evidence beyond the dent of any impact. And the paint wasn't even scratched on my rear dumper or anywhere around the dents. Very strange.

Gene gave me an estimate on getting those dents fixed, ~$850. Since it didn't appear to be the same accident, I imagined my insurance company would consider it a separate claim with another deductible payment. Ouch. So, since it's just minor cosmetic dent, I'll just wait for someone to run into my car's rear-end again.

This all reinforces the idea that it makes little sense to have a car that's particularly nice on the outside. Of course, winter salt followed by mud season in Maine had given me this same practical idea long ago.

Under the "boy they did that wrong" category. I imagine I'll have more of these to catalog, so I made it an honest-to-goodness category for this blog.

At my new apartment, I've got ceiling fans with built-in lamps in three rooms. In all the rooms, the fan is wired to a switch panel with two switches. One switch controls the power to the whole unit, fan blades and fan lamp. The other controls the power to some power outlet in the room.

That means if I want to change whether the lamp is on while leaving the fan on for circulation — a very common desire in the bedroom and in the living room (for tv watching and such) — then I have to reach up uncomfortably (they aren't all easy to reach) and pull the little chain that rubs against the lamp housing. I'm also nervous that this manipulation will put the fans out-of-balance if done often. I've already had two of the fans fixed/replaced because when out-of-balance they make an unacceptable whirr-whirr noise.

I may have to plug floor lamps into the switched sockets and leave off the fan lamps. But then I have to be careful not to actually turn off the floor lamp itself. I've got this setup in one room and I keep getting confused about where I turned the floor lamp off: the lamp itself, the wall switch, or both. Often turning off the floor lamp at the lamp's location is most convenient.

The place should have been wired so that one switch controls the fan blades and the other fan lamp. I asked the apt office to see if they could investigate if it can be done by re-wiring, conjecturing that the wires may already be in the walls as I desire as the place was built in 1997 and they should have foreseen this type of wiring situation. I've wired fans that way myself in a Habitat for Humanity house last summer, where the people who did the wall wiring had already set it up to work as I describe: one for blades, one for lamp. The apt office people reported back to me that they were told by maintenance that the wires were not in place and the wall would have to be opened to do it.