By Troy Cunningham

My wife and I were moving from Chicago to Madison, WI a couple of years ago. We lived in a third floor apartment. This simple fact was probably the saving grace of our whole move because we didn't want to haul all our stuff down three flights of stairs ourselves. In addition to reserving our UHaul truck by putting down a deposit with a credit card, we reserved a local moving company to send a few movers over to help us load it. 

It was Friday night. We were supposed to move on Saturday. I came home from having a few farewell drinks with some workmates to a cryptic message on the machine. "This is X from UHaul. I just wanted to let you know that your truck didn't come in today. It should be in sometime tomorrow. Call me if you have any questions." Of course by now they were closed.

My heart sank. My wife had already started work in Madison. As I was listening to the message, she was en route back to Chicago to help with the move. She needed to be back at the new job on Monday. We had planned to pick up the truck the next morning. The movers were showing up at 9 am to start loading. The woman who was supposed to move into the apartment we were leaving had already called and asked when she could start bringing things over. In short, we had many, many reasons why waiting around for a truck for a few days just wasn't going to work for us.

I told her the news and we discussed our options. We didn't have very many. After our years of experience fighting crowds in Chicago, we knew that sometimes just being louder than the next guy was all you needed to do. We vowed that when UHaul opened the next morning, we would be waiting and come hell or high water, we weren't going to be the ones who ended up without a truck.

The next morning we arrived at UHaul fifteen minutes before they opened their doors. To our utter dismay we found ourselves standing outside with a dozen people who had had the same idea. One woman we talked to was on her second day of waiting already. The doors opened, we kicked and screamed for an hour. We didn't get anywhere. They didn't have any trucks in town. In fact, they didn't have any trucks in any of the suburban locations they called either. There didn't seem to be any UHaul trucks available in the greater Chicago area. In fact, after an hour on the phone going methodically through the yellow pages, I came to the conclusion there weren't any trucks available anywhere in Chicago. Not that we were all that surprised at that. Chicago is one of those cities where it's a good idea to have a reservation before you do much of anything.

As if the morning could get any better, the woman who was going to be moving into the apartment we were moving out of called between my frantic calls to every truck rental ad in the yellow pages. She wanted to know when we thought we'd be out and if would be possible for her to start bringing some things over that afternoon.

Then the movers called. They had three guys on their way over and should be there in fifteen minutes. I looked at my watch. Quarter of nine. They were right on schedule.

From then on, things got kind of blurry. The moving company offered to do the entire move for us. As we couldn't get a truck anywhere else in the greater Chicago area and this was our only window of opportunity we took them up on it. It cost a lot more, but was handled with the utmost professionalism and attention to detail. If you're in the Chicago area and in need of a great moving company, I highly recommend Golan's Moving.

Twenty-four hours later, in a new home with a significantly lighter wallet, I made a folder with all receipts with all the costs we'd incurred because of UHaul's negligence, and I set off to figure out how to re-claim our losses.