Robo-rental

 I haven’t been able to think up a clever nickname for the new man in my life. I could call him Other Dan, but that would be a bit on the smarmy side, so I’ll just call him by his middle name, Dan.

Dan retired at the beginning of the year and has been schlepping back and forth to his apartment in Key West to pack his car with things he barely has room for in his condo that is not ten minutes away from me here in Hollywood. This past weekend we scheduled four days to post his furniture online for giveaway, and what didn’t get taken we would leave on the street to be picked up my people in need who had trucks. In other words, we were all prepared for hospitalization in the orthopedic wing due to back and body aches.

Turns out, we didn’t have to do any of that, because the new tenants, whom he knew, would take what furniture they wanted, and the rest would be sold or otherwise disposed of by the manager of his condo, with whom he was good friends. 

Dan had lived in the southernmost city for decades, and he knew everyone. I say this because when we took back his cable and WiFi box, three people in the store knew him. Two were employees. I was impressed with, and a little jealous, of his huge circle of friends and am still curious as to why he is so eager to live in a new town where everybody doesn’t know his name. But I am quite happy with the time he spends with me every day. I am even happier that he makes dinner every night and keeps us well stocked in homemade oatmeal toffee cookies.

Dan had decided that he would rent a U-Haul truck to take back the last load of keepsakes, including a king-sized, floppy and thick mattress. I had bought mattress straps so we could carry it down to the truck, but it was too heavy and floppy to get the straps around, even though we tried for a half hour to do so. So we ended up dragging it down and destroying the mattress cover. 

Bear in mind we are two seventy-year-old out of shape men who have promised each other we will start back at the gym as soon as we get all of our hardware problems fixed with our bodies.

We stood out in 93° heat trying our damnedest to stuff it into the truck. It was an awful day. Hot and humid, and Key West, and for that matter, all of Monroe County, stinks to hell of rotting sargassum. You can smell it through a closed car with the air conditioning running on recirculate. It was that bad. 

Fortunately, in time a young man saw us struggling with the mattress, and asked if we needed some help. 

“Yes, please,” we both answered in unison.

Although he didn’t look like one, I am sure this kid was an NFL blocker. With locomotive strength, he dived into the mattress and slid it into the truck as if it had been bathed in Vaseline. We thanked him, and I immediately started worrying how in the hell we would get it out when we arrived at his over-55 community back here in Hollywood, where the elevator was too small to get it into, and NFL blockers were in short supply. 

Eventually we stuffed the rest of his things into the truck and set off for his new home in a better smelling county.

Renting the truck was a rather eye-opening experience in AI. Dan had made the reservation online, so there had been no phone calls or human contact to do that. When we got to the U-Haul store, there was no one there, no customer service counter, no signs of human life. But upon entry, we triggered a large screen that connected us with either an AI bot or a human being, who could have been, for all we knew, in Antarctica. He/it asked for the reservation number and located it and told us he had just texted Dan instructions on how to get the key, and he/it said if we had any questions to come back inside for clarification.

The instructions were clear. Dan took a few pictures of the truck, inside and out, and uploaded them, and then we waited about ten minutes for approval, and he was sent the combination to the key box.

Everything was pretty simple, but this was my first experience with automated customer service, which I found pretty depressing. Sure they have raised the minimum wage nationwide, but they have also figured out a digital way of eliminating minimum wage jobs. I’m sure this will be the wave of the future, and by the time I’m on my deathbed, there will be AI nurses to keep me comfortable with digital opioids.

Returning the truck also was contactless, and didn’t even involve any AI bots or screens. He just had to take more pictures of the truck and drop the key in a box behind the building.

We have no one but ourselves to blame for this new wave of no-contact customer service. I suspect it was created as a result of our complaining about shabby treatment from underpaid employees, and the onset of the coronavirus. But also because of greedy corporations doing everything they can to increase profits for shareholders.

By the way, we did get the old mattress out of his condo and the new, big floppy mattress up the stairs, into the condo and onto the bed frame.

Dan hired two living human teenage boys to do it. In my opinion, that was the best $100 ever spent. And it was reassuring that there is still, for now, a place for human contact.