by Troy Cunningham

Here's another interesting thing I learned in this process. Just because you win a case doesn't mean that UHaul is going to sit down and cut you a check. You have to figure out how to get the money out of them. The good news about this is that you might be eligible for interest on the money owed you while you're waiting for the next round of paperwork to go through. In Wisconsin it was something like 16% so worth looking into if you're owed a decent amount of money.

Once again, I was back to the fact that UHaul is not a lot of separate entities but a single corporation. By that reasoning, I should be able to choose a location that's convenient to me to go after. This is what I did. I went down to a local UHaul location and bought a roll of tape. I wrote a check for it and waited for the check to clear. When the check came back, it had some cryptic message on the back that didn't directly link it to any bank. I had to resort to Plan B, which was to call a UHaul location, explain that I was having trouble with some double charges on a check I wrote there, and could I get the name of their bank so I could call them and sort out the mess. They were more than happy to help me. Just for fun, I called the bank to see if they would verify that the account number stamped on the back of my cancelled check was one of theirs. The nice lady at the other end of the phone confirmed that it was.

I headed back to the county courthouse one more time to garnishment papers against the ruling I had already received. UHaul gets served again. The bank gets a copy of the papers.

And then the funniest thing happened. The poor manager of this UHaul location, who's never met me and knows nothing about my case against UHaul, gets informed that the amount of my ruling has been frozen in his bank account pending another hearing that's a week away. 

Apparently, he had a fit and called the corporate offices to see what was going on. Then UHaul calls and asks if I will drop the garnishment proceedings if they Fed-Ex me a check for the full amount. The check shows up the next day and I call the dogs off at the county courthouse and the bank account is released. Case closed.