07 May 03 - 07:16pm.
Never under any circumstances rent a U-Haul to move cross-country. Never.
Ever.
Friday and Saturday, May 2-3
The truck was really old. And gooky. And it smelled funny. And it was diesel. But I didn’t figure a stinky old diesel truck was really something you could complain about and request correction for. So I didn’t. I didn’t realise until after I bought the adapter that there wasn’t even a cigarette-lighter hole in the stupid thing. But that’s fine… No biggie. It was only going to be a convenience. Just meant that I didn’t get to talk on the phone for the whole trip, since the battery would be dead within about an hour. I wasn’t packed by Friday night, and I ended up leaving later than I had originally planned. That was fine too. I got a good night’s sleep, which is more important than leaving on time, considering if I left early on 2 hours of sleep, I’d be dead somewhere in the middle, versus leaving later on 9+ hours of sleep (or something like that) where I can make it though the whole drive at once.
That was the theory.
Armed with my Red Bull, salami and a ferret seatbelted in next to me, off I went.
Sometime around 7pm… Something seems off with the truck. I’m on I-75 drifting between 65-70 miles/hour… And I realise that if I press the gas down to far, it seems like the engine cuts out, sort of like it would jump and start losing momentum… but I could let off the gas and press it down carefully again, and it kept going. I figure maybe it’s just in my head and keep driving. I check it a little bit later, and it’s still doing it. So I call my dad. “It dies when I do this.” He says, “Well, don’t do that.” Ok… So I don’t. But eventually I need to fill up the tank… So I pull off the freeway at an exit with the intention of turning left and going to a travel center. I got to the end of the exit ramp… But didn’t move after that. I’m pressing on the gas, and it’s revving, but absolutely nothing’s happening in terms of forward movement… There’s three semi-trucks on the ramp behind me… I finally just got out of the truck and stood next to it, with my arms up in the air, with the sort of, “I’m stuck, move on, or sit there… Because I’m not going anywhere,” look on my face… One of them got out of his truck and came over to try to offer some help, but what he suggested didn’t work. “Looks like your transmission is dead.” Great. I had the ramp completely blocked, and left was the direction of the only open anything that you could see from I-75… Which meant there were semis every half hour or so… So blah. Time to go call the 24 hour roadside assistance hotline. But… I have a dead cell phone. So I reluctantly leave the ferret in the truck and run over to a gas station just to the right of the ramp. By this time, I’m sobbing… Trying to ask if I can borrow a phone… Everyone in the place is staring at me like there’s something growing out of my face… I get through and such, and I’m waiting on hold, and the guy behind the counter is babbling to me in broken english about how I need to have them call me back because people call them about the lotto… And I’m trying to explain that I’m on hold and there isn’t anyone to call me back yet… Ok. They say they’ll have someone out to check it. So I go back out to the truck to wait… And have a few aneurisms as I watch two semis crawl carefully around the truck with about 2 inches clearance (literally) to make the left turn to get to the travel center. I grabbed the ferret and my mobile and sat on the sidewalk twenty feet from the truck.Thirty minutes later they call and say someone will be there in 45 minutes. It’s about 9:45pm at this point… But he gets there about 15 minutes later. “Your transmission fluid is completely empty.” Meh. Says he thinks it might be leaking. So he puts more in, follows me to the travel center so I can get diesel, and he lets me charge his phone in his car while we wait. Then he followed me down I-75 for a couple of miles to make sure it was alright. Nice guy… Just not nice enough.
I decide that I don’t want to stay in Atlanta… Better not to stay in the city, cheaper etc etc… So I’m driving to the limit of my consciousness… And driving through Atlanta when you’re awake is enough of an adventure… Considering the road goes from two lanes to three lanes to five lanes to six lanes, back down to three… And it’s never just on one side… You’ll be in the right lane and then suddenly there’s two more lanes to the right of you… But you don’t move over because they more often than not turn into exit-only lanes… but then when you don’t move over, the two lanes to the left of you disappear, and suddenly you’re in the fast lane with people all pissed off whizzing past you… Anyway… Got out of Atlanta and suddenly there was nothing, which was starting to worry me… Finally there’s an exit with hotel signs. So I pull onto the exit ramp. This time, I pull onto the shoulder of the ramp and come to a complete stop and then go again… Figure I’d rather die on the ramp than in the middle of it this time… And it went, so I figured the guy fixed it. The hotels weren’t right on I-75… somewhere down this service drive… And the closest one seemed more expensive, so I decided to try to find the second one… about ten seconds past the first hotel, it starts to die. Again. This wierd jumping thing… like it’s going to die, then jumps back to life for a moment before repeating… I manage to turn around and get back to the hotel and into a parking spot. I stayed there. Cried more. Slept. Prepared to deal with roadside assistance. Again.
Sunday, May 4, Kinnesaw, GA
I dragged myself out of bed at 9am so I could check out and call U-Haul and get everything taken care of and be back on the road at some normal type time. I checked out and called. They gave me a number and said if I didn’t hear back from them in thirty minutes to call this number. I ended up waiting forty five minutes on accident… And called the number… and she says to me, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any record that you actually called.” Oh. So she gets all my info, and says she’ll call me back. I waited and called her back again, and she got a little perturbed with me, saying that she was trying to find someone. I got a little perturbed back saying I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t been forgotten about again. Twenty to thirty minutes after that she called me back and said someone would be out in an hour to an hour and a half. It was noon already. So I waited for an hour and a half until a mechanic finally showed up. I tell him what the first mechanic said about leaky transmission, and so he gets under the truck and pokes at some stuff and announces that he’s found a loose hose that’s causing the problem. He tightens it, and dumps a whole bunch more transmission fluid into it, the whole while explaining how he was in the middle of mowing his lawn, and how he used to be an employee of uhaul and couldn’t believe that they had given me the truck for this trip… His wife called somewhere along the line, and that was mildly amusing… He was kinda rude to her and then made naggy type noises after he got off the phone, bitching about how she wasn’t listening to anything he said. He had two children, 4mos and 8 yrs… but he worked too much. (He talked a lot.) So blah, it’s 2:30pm and I’m back on the road, confident that I’m finally on my way home.
This is where it begins to seem like one of those dreams… Where you’re trying to get somewhere and no matter how hard you try, you can’t quite seem to make it….
It was just 3 hours later… stopped earlier than normal to get fuel… And I decided to check my transmission fluid level. Some guy getting gas came over and helped me… Totally empty. “You need a new truck,” he says… and tells me where there’s a U-Haul center… but I decide I’d better call the roadside assistance first. In the midst of all this, I call the center around 5:45pm… It closed at 5:30pm… Back to roadside assistance. “We’ll have someone out there soon to take a look at it.” I try to explain to her that I need a new vehicle, that if two mechanics can’t fix it, it’s not going to be fixed by a third. “I’m sorry, all we can do is call a mechanic… I don’t know how to get you a new truck.” OMFG. So I grabbed my ferret and sat on the sidewalk in front of the truck to wait. I ended up talking to some woman with an absolutely adorable long-hair mini-daschund puppy. She says she’s driving the puppy to her daughter’s house because of something going on with her current housing… Turns out she’s from Orlando too. I tell her about all the stupid problems. She got worried and kept telling me to be careful, that she was going to worry about me as if I were one of her children. I held her puppy for her so she could go to bathroom. “You won’t take her will you? She’s my life…” And apparently she was the puppy’s life too, because the poor baby cried the whole time the woman was gone and was just excited out of her skin when she came back. She had get going and told me again to be careful. About an hour or so later another mechanic shows up. Doesn’t say much… pokes at it, turns it on, turns it off… Sprays some really pungent something or other all over something under it… then walks over to me and sits cross-legged on the sidewalk next to me. “It’s the front seal on the transmission… I’ll have to pull the whole thing to fix it.” *sigh* It’s Sunday evening at this point, so nothing more can be done until the following morning. He tells me it’s good to drive to the hotel, asks me about my ferret… As I pull out of the gas station, it jumps and threatens not to accelerate as I pulled into traffic on a five lane highway… I managed to make it into the hotel, and just pulled into a spot and decided to be done with it. His name was Jeff and he gave me three numbers to call him personally… I didn’t have to deal with roadside assistance anymore. I went to bed early so I could get up early.
Monday, May 4, Knoxville, TN
I called them around 8:30am… It was noon thirty or something close by the time someone came to get the truck. We had to go back to the shop to “transload” my stuff from my truck to the new one. It was twenty minutes from the hotel… The whole thing was pretty mundane. It’s three mechanics moving my stuff from the back of the old truck into the back of the new one, which only really worried me because the bigger heavier stuff had been up near the front of the first truck, and since it got packed into the second truck in the order it was removed from the first… it all ended up in the back. I decided I didn’t really care. I thanked Jeff for everything, and I was back on the road around 1:30pm.
*ring* “Jeff… it’s Kat. I’m sitting on the side of I-75 about 40 minutes away from you… The engine cut out suddenly and now it won’t start…”
Seriously.
So I call my mom, sobbing. She starts trying to figure out how she can come get me, how we could ship my stuff… something so I could just come home. She calls my dad who decides to call customer service, and ends up calling the roadside assistance people too, so there’s a record of the fourth breakdown. Fourth. I didn’t call them because I knew Jeff would come and take care of me, and the roadside assistance people had their heads up their asses and I probably would have killed someone. So my dad starts calling me every few minutes to get more information that these people need. They don’t have any record of me having the vehicle because I’d only had it for an hour or so. A highway patrol officer stopped behind me somewhere along the line. “You got someone coming?” I said I’d called the mechanic… He asked for my cell phone to call him… said something about towing it to the nearest U-Haul center to save him a trip… I guess Jeff told him it was under control. He gave me back my phone and said he’d come back and check on me when he got off at 3:00pm. My dad called a bunch more, asking for all my information… I guess they were manually adding it into the system so they knew I existed with the vehicle… about an hour after I called him, Jeff showed up with another mechanic. He opens the hood and pokes around at a few things… Gets ready to go back to his van for something, and says “What the hell is this?” Reaches in and reconnects something. Starts the truck. It works. “What was that?” I asked… “The spark plug wire fell off,” he says. I asked him if he would drive it to the next exit, in case that wasn’t it. It’s a part of I-75 where its curves and steep hills. He said he had to turn around anyway, so I rode in the van with the other mechanic. We pulled off at the next exit, which was literally in the middle of nowhere… Almost couldn’t find the entrance back onto I-75, but it was a u-turn… the entrance ramp was practically connected to the exit. “How much are those ferrets?” he asks me… I told him about where they can be gotten… “She just sat there and watched me drive, all quiet like. She’s really cute.” So once again I thanked Jeff profusely and got back on the road.
The wind was really strong, gusting the truck around the road. A couple of hours later the Emergency Broadcast System beeps through my radio station to inform me that there were two sighted tornado touch downs and a severe weather warning, with hail the size of golf balls.
Joy.
As they were talking, the rain started to fall, and fell harder and harder until I couldn’t see anything at all. I had been trying to stay at a somewhat high speed, but it finally got so bad that I had to slow down to a crawl. The rain seemed to clear a little, but then it almost looked like slush, which couldn’t be right, it was 68 degrees or something outside… but I knew it had been slush when the hail started pinging off the truck. And as soon as it was there, it was gone, and I-75 was a parking lot. It was around 6:00pm. I called my dad to let him know I was stopped and to see if he could find out what the deal was. He had no idea. Then a call beeped in from “unavailable.” “Hello?” “Hello, is this Katherine?” “Ya…” “Hello, Katherine, this is U-Haul. I’m calling to let you know there will be a mechanic out in about an hour.” ” For what..?” “For the engine problem you’re having?” Four hours I would have waited. For the call. Another hour for the mechanic. Forty five minutes later traffic began moving again, and less than an eighth of a mile ahead of where I was sitting, around a curve where I couldn’t see… was an upside-down semi truck.
A couple of hours later, I see a police officer turn around from going the opposite direction. I glance down at the spedometer like I always do when I see a cop, even when I’m driving a GIANT box truck in a wind storm, and I’m going exactly the speed limit. So I continue on my way and realise somewhere along the line that the officer is pacing me. First he’s in the lane next to me, a little behind me. Then he’s in right behind me in the same lane. This goes on for about 20 minutes. Of course I’m paranoid. I get paranoid when I see a cop at all, much less when I’m being paced by one… And next thing I know… he’s got the lights on and is pulling me over. So I’m waiting for him to come to the window, and then he taps on the passenger side window, which I wasn’t expected, and scared the crap out of me. The adrenaline was already rushing, and that caused a definite surge. He asked me for my license and registration, which I didn’t have the original U-Haul registration for this truck, because Jeff had printed me one off the computer at his shop, and the cop sort of looked at it funny when I handed it to him. I handed him all the other paperwork too, since that stuff had my name and address on it, and the one I had for this truck didn’t. From the way he looked at everything though, it seems to me like I could have handed him a take out menu from someplace and it probably would have held as much merit. He asked me if I was tired and I lied and said I wasn’t. I was not about to say yes with the risk of being asked to stop. I asked him why. He said, “You’re driving over the line a little. You going alright?” I told him that I just wasn’t used to driving a big truck, which was somewhat true, but I’m actually pretty good at driving big vehicles. But considering it was a moving truck, I figured I could say that and would be ok, since I doubt most people are “used” to driving moving trucks. People don’t make it a point to move all the time. Either way, he told me to be careful. And he asked me about my ferret. Then he reminded me to try to get up to speed before entering the freeway and watch for oncoming traffic so nobody got hurt, and told me to have a good evening. So off I went. Again.
WILL THE INSANITY NEVER END.
The rest of the trip was somewhat uneventful. I was really tired before I even got to Michigan, but be damned if I was going to stop this close to home. When I got off the freeway at what should have been about twenty minutes from my house, I pulled into pea-soup fog, and had to drive about twenty miles/hour the entire way.
Forty minutes later I was home. Seventy plus hours later than originally planned.
You might assume that it ends here. You’d think that it has to end here. That it’s completely far fetched to think that it continues. Well… remember that I have to deal with getting reimbursed for the hotel stays and the trip… *sigh*
To be continued. Lesse if I can finish it without killing someone.
