Storage Units

Part of the logistics of moving to the Isle of Wight involved our having to use a Storage Unit. In fact, at a cost of around £180 per month, we're still using it. Fortunately we're not having to visit it now we're safely ensconced on the Island, but in the latter part of 2023, we had to deal with the peculiar and alien world of Storage Units more than we would have liked.

Visiting a storage unit for the first time is like walking into some kind of futuristic, dystopian sci-fi film. Storage unit companies are always called something simple and clear such as Storage For You, Your Storage, or Budget Storage. The storage industry seem to have taken the view that potential customers are easily confused, as though there’s a danger someone will come in and ask for a pound of potatoes and a punnet of strawberries.

The protocol for depositing and extracting your possessions from them is tremendously exciting - well the first time anyway; it soon pales - by the second visit, actually. After reversing towards an imposing looking shutter (in your car - you don’t have to walk backwards), you start proceedings off by typing a combination of six letters and numbers into a keypad, enjoying the pleasing life-affirming beeping sound made when each number is pressed. This should in theory open the shutter, but it doesn’t because you’ve typed it in incorrectly. I don’t know about you but I’ve got PINs and passwords coming out of every orifice. A lot of them are the same but it tends to be best to keep your debit card PIN as a discrete number. So whilst 7824 is my banking PIN number I use other combinations of characters for other things…..

Anyway you eventually get it right and enter a ‘warehousy’ type structure. Then you press the same number on a different keypad to get a trolley from an exciting bit of the warehousy thing which contains palettes, trolleys and other imposing, manly items of that order. It helps to have a tattoo for this bit of the operation, though this is optional.

Something from the trolley is bound to fall onto your left foot at this point, causing you to hop about for a minute, and during which the shutter closes again. Whilst hopping around clutching your foot and shouting “F**k!”, you again type the code in to the keypad incorrectly. Often this leads to even more swearing.

Pushing the trolley around is strangely satisfying; I think it’s because you’re role playing working in a warehouse. After this brief reverie the code is then required a third time to open the lift which transports you to the floor your unit occupies. This is normally on the top floor and the furthest unit from the lift.

After the lift opens, it invariably starts to close before you’ve had time to run around and push your trolley into it; this often ends up with you on the floor covered in pictures, lamps, a box of books on American politics and a statue of St. Francis, all of which have fallen from the trolley because of both your need for speed and an overly optimistic loading technique. It is the law of storage units that you always cram too much onto your trolley; a kitchen bin rolling forlornly away from you down the corridor of the unit is never enough to make you learn this lesson.

On leaving the lift you get hopelessly lost, going round and round in circles trying to locate your unit; they all look the same, as do the corridors; I once met a man pushing a trolley full of boxes who’d been in there for three weeks trying to find the lift! The manager told me that a teacher had once asked if they could use the place as a setting for a short film based on a serial killer. It does have a Nordic Noir feel about it.

It’s a joyless, exasperating but strangely exciting experience and process - and not a cheap one. Hopefully we'll reclaim our possessions soon, but in the meantime - a toast to the fascinating world of the storage unit!