I’m so smart I’m stupid.

My wife wants to sell our house and move.  Her parents (and mine) don’t like climbing the 17 steep front steps and they won’t visit us anymore.  There is no talking her out of the move and anyway, she’s already packed up half the house because the real estate agent told her to.  While this was happening,  I did my part by hoping she would get over her idea of moving and I got a moving company to estimate the cost of our move.   The moving company pegged the total cost at over $6,000.00;  I immediately looked for a cheaper way to move.

Being the clever person that I am, and I have a crew of painters who can help out, I figured I personally could do the move for less. So, I rented a U-haul, had one of my employees bring it to our house, and loaded the boxes and furniture with my crew of painters.   I glowed all day with the inner radiance a genius gets when he saves a pile of money by doing something himself.

It took most of the day to load the truck with a small portion of our stuff. The rest stays with us until we sell the house.  At 4:00 PM, I called the storage facility to tell them I was on the way.  They told me that they close at 4:30 and I’d have to unload tomorrow. Humm…, I assumed that storage facilities are open 24 hours.   My inner radiance dimmed somewhat from this news.  Now I have to pay U-haul for a second day.  That doubles my truck cost, but gives me a bit more time to load the truck.

At noon the next day, I carefully pulled the fully loaded U-haul truck out into the street and merged into traffic.  It had been a long time since I drove a truck this big and I wondered if I still had my truck driving abilities.  I noticed the loosest steering I had ever felt but I figured it was my being out of practice with a big truck.  The truck appeared to have no transmission but it did have a 10 cylinder gas guzzling engine. The driver’s seat was torn old gray fabric and  had concentric circles of stains, it looked like each previous driver had urinated in place as they drove.  I felt dirty sitting in it.  There is no possible way it can be legal to rent a truck this disgusting.

Driving this fishtailing behemoth on the 405 and 5 freeways at rush hour felt like being on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ride at Disneyland.  After careening past the freeway off ramp which was my exit (because I was changing the radio station), I spent the next half hour threading my way back through unfamiliar streets to the storage facility.  When I finally got there I had to wait a half hour for someone to guide me to the larger auxiliary storage facility.  What am I going to do? I put a dollar into the soda vending machine and selected a super size cactus cooler to drink while I waited because I needed an orange pineapple blast after my U-haul freeway experience.

After unloading all my things and looking to feel good about myself,  I asked the storage facility people how long they thought it would take for their movers to move the items from my phase 1 move.  They looked at it and said two hours.  It would have cost me $400.00 to do it right.  In that split second, I calculated that I was spending $177 for the truck, $55 for gas, and $1,200.00 for my men to help me; more than three times what it should have cost, not to mention my two wasted days.  Boy, I am mad at myself.  My father has a saying that some people are so smart that they’re stupid.  I’m not telling my father about this day.

I now had to race back to the U-haul lot to return the truck before I got charged for another day.  I had to return the truck with a full gas tank or face all types of U-haul penalties including paying something like $90.00 a gallon from their private pumps.  I pulled into a Unocal with a mini-mart.   I love eating at gas stations because they have treats that you can’t find anywhere else.  I spotted a new item, a bag of Planter’s “five alarm” chili flavored peanuts and the always enjoyable tuna mystery sandwich on white bread.

I brought my goodies to the attendant behind the bullet proof cashier’s window to pay for my gas and gourmet snacks.  My credit card has my picture on it from 16 years ago from my “athletic, good looking” days.  The officious Filipina takes my credit card looks at it and then looks back at me and says, “U so fat!”  “Dis not U!”  “I need second ID.”  After verifying I was me, she continued on by asking me why I eat so much.

I paid for my food and gas and exited her bullet proofed fiefdom to fill my tank without chit chatting with her any further.

Finally, I arrived at the U-Haul lot and dropped off the truck.  Now I’m stuck in Pacoima with no way to get home.  I’m not paying for a cab at this hour, so I call my wife and have her drive 20 miles across the city at rush hour to pick me up.  She had no one to look after the kids so she loaded them in the car and rode out to retrieve me.