The Kinds Of Things You Trip Over When You're Fact-Checking Your Fiction

[dr_pretentious]

I wanted to know how big a U-Haul truck one of my characters would have rented when the time came to flee her meth-head ex-husband, and I accidentally discovered what happens to U-Haul trucks when they retire. Anybody need a huge box truck, real cheap?

Now my brain is trying to come up with a story about a character who would have some good reason to buy one of those trucks. Or better yet, some dubious yet desperate reason. Or a really bad reason, someone for whom the purchase would be a big mistake, with consequences. Not now, brain! We're already working on a story!

Comments

[tigira.livejournal.com]

And as another bit of trivia, they don't fit through fast-food drive throughs.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Dan and I learned the hard way that bikes on car-top bike racks don't fit into parking garages.

Actually, we learned it the hard way twice. I'm usually pretty good at learning from other people's mistakes, but it seems there are some I just have to make for myself.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Hee hee!

[welshbard.livejournal.com]

Most people will significantly under- or over-estimate how big a truck to get. It all depends on how good they are at packing a truck. Having not enough room means they have to make two trips, or leave stuff behind. Having too much truck means it's harder to maneuver and stuff will bounce around more.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

As a chronic underestimater of how much stuff I own, I'd never encountered the too-much-truck problems. Good to know.

[irishninja.livejournal.com]

Coming here via Shadawyn, who called me over just to show me this site, so I wanted to say thanks for pointing this out. I don't want a box van, but UHaul also has full-size pickup trucks, which I do want. And this makes them affordable! ^_^

Good luck on your story of the desperate soul who needs to buy a box truck!

If you need any amount of humor in any story involving a box van: most people try to drive them like they drive cars and forget to extend further into a lane before turning, resulting in lots of scrapes (sometimes with other cars!). Can be funny or tragic, depending on how you use it. ~_o

And with that, I end this long comment. Good luck with your stories and thanks again!! ^_^

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

May you find the pickup truck of your dreams.

One of my nieces calls them hiccup trucks, and a truck that's seen enough hard living with UHaul to get retired may have a hiccup or two. I'll have to drop by your lj from time to time and see whether yours brings you anecdotes or epics.

[peartreealley.livejournal.com]

They also sell pick-up trucks at a price I'd consider spending, which I just showed to my man and made him very happy. He really wants a truck to... have a truck, I guess? I think, short of certain occupations/hobbies we don't have or do, trucks are a waste of money and natural resources and have thus vetoed his previous overtures on the topic.

But maybe we'll find a compromise yet ;)

Edit: Hey look, he commented himself ;)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

My sister's husband wanted a truck just to have a truck--you can take the boy off the ranch, but not the ranch out of the boy. They don't need to own one, but they have used it to help a lot of friends move. On the rare occasion that it gets driven, it seems mostly to generate good karma.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Let me annotate -- I think of U-Haul trucks as being in horrible, borderline-one-hoss-shay condition *before* they retire them.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

That thought had crossed my mind, too. When I think of all the awful truck rental stories I've heard over the years, it's hard to imagine what would have to be true of the truck U-Haul wouldn't rent anymore.

[laradionne.livejournal.com]

My U-Haul nightmares from our move to AZ from CA took a while to subside, but at least the truck made it into the driveway of our new home before the drive-shaft and rear-axel broke. The U-haul place we managed to get it to didn't want to accept it when we tried to turn it in. =P We got the lemon of a truck because they messed up our reservation and thought we were moving in December instead of November... "We're sorry, but we can't give you the new truck you were promised" ... instead we will give you the truck with no heater that can only go 25 mph uphill when fully loaded...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'm picturing the end of the long chase scene in The Blues Brothers, when the car has given everything it has and simply disintegrates the instant Jake and Elwood step out of it.

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

The next time you come to visit, ask my darling for the story of the parking lot full of unregistered box trucks and the questionable people who owned them...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Now that is a story I must hear.

oaktavia has some alarming stories from her time working in a car rental place. It's more common than you'd think for a car to get returned with a body in the trunk. Now, if I were writing that story, I'd have figured, someone has stuffed a body in the trunk, so they're going to come up with some way of hiding or destroying the car. But returning it to the rental agency? Even having used fake ID to rent it in the first place would seem to me insufficient protection for the culprit, if the culprit were fictional, but apparently it was good enough.

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

Well, when last we moved (less than a mile)it was a huge fiasco because of U-Haul not having the truck we thought we reserved. We ended up scrambling around the morning of the move and renting a truck from another company which delayed things by about 2 hours. So if you want reliability, pick a company other than U-haul.

On a completely unrelated note, a bunch of my sister's friends got a moving truck instead of a limo for the prom (they just disliked the pretentiousness and conspicuous consumption of a limo I think).

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I love the idea of the prom U-Haul.

A million years ago when I was a grad student, some friends and I went to the big annual convention of literature professors, which was in San Francisco that year. Getting a cab from Chinatown to the convention hotel in time for the keynote speech was Just Not Happening. We stopped at the taxi stand of the first hotel we came to--where, of course, there were no taxis--and a limo driver with no other fare prospects allowed us to haggle him down to $25 to get the four of us across town. Arriving at the MLA as if at the prom--we shabby grad students in our secondhand suits, with the decorative neon gleaming inside the limo and out--was one of the giddier moments of my life in academia.

I know, I know!

[amushink.livejournal.com]

I've had an attraction to moving trucks for years because of the quality of light inside of them.

The translucent walls filter the sunlight through with a beautiful yoga-studio quality. Every time we move I have a moment of standing in the truck when just a few bits are loaded, thinking "cut a few windows and I could happily live in this."

My neighbor has one in his yard (retired box only, not truck) as a shed.

Re: I know, I know!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Excellent! I'd imagined my protagonist taking a chainsaw to the walls to cut windows, but I hadn't really thought about the quality of the light s/he'd have before cutting them.

Okay, it looks like I'll have to write this thing, eventually. Who knew the U-Haul Story would turn out to be its own genre?

The Uhaul story

[amushink.livejournal.com]

HAS it's own genre, but usually involves lesbians.