Dude, Where’s My Camper?

So, you have saved, scrimped and saved some more and the day has finally arrived– you can purchase your brand-new camper.  Can’t you just feel it, the call of the open road, the smell of the trees, the air and the sudden greeting of the dump station aroma, ahh–this is American camping.  It’s that moment when Americans load almost everything, they own into a confined space on a vehicle with 6 to 10 wheels or a trailer– once the traveling refuge of horses and cattle.  It is the American dream to have your home on your back for two weeks and all of the U.S. is your frontier.  Never mind the fact that the setup of the camper at the campsite has been the cause of numerous divorces and heart attacks.  Just take a deep breath of that fresh air and say to yourself “I am there”.

But when the vacation is over there are many chores that must be completed before you put away your palace on wheels.  You must unload and relocate your household’s worth of goods, especially the perishable items.  Of course, there is the cleaning of the inside and outside of your mobile vacation residence.  The winterizing of the vehicle is an absolute must (in some cases) and for good measures, you throw on a little wax or maybe even a cover to protect your vehicle for the 50 weeks that it sits unused. Many store their magic carpet of the vacation getaway in their driveway or maybe the yard.  For some, it may be stored at a lot created for such vehicles and keeping them out of sight and out of mind.  That is the subject of this blog.

I have some dear friends who have owned campers for many years.  Once they retired, they became very avid campers traversing the country.  They have owned various types of campers, types A, B and C (you can look up the different types) all of which have their own distinct advantages.  As they are now getting older, they recently downsized their camper from a motorhome to a size C camper which is on a large truck body with a truck cab.  It has all the accoutrement that you can imagine in a camper of a very high caliber of quality.  It is a very beautiful machine that I could see myself and the love of my life traveling around the country.

In recent years my friends have parked their campers on various storage lots that claimed to be securely monitored and are fenced and gated. This past year they moved their camper to a different lot that was closer to their home, one that was said to have a sterling reputation of security and boutique service.  The service included battery care and some other wintertime maintenance that is necessary with campers that are motorized.  It claimed to have some certifications, I’m not certain if that included being bonded or other security credentials that deem them to be reliable.  They had a series of security cameras surrounding the lot that were supposedly operating 24/7/365.  The gate to the entrance of the storage lot had a security pad with a security code for each person who stored their vehicles on the property.  It seemed like a perfectly great place to store the camper for the winter or anytime.

As wintertime approaches the Midwest it has become the tradition of my friends to pack up their camper and head south for the winter.  They have a home in Florida where they spend most of the brutal Midwest winter months at.  This year was to be no different as the month of November arrived and with it their hasty departure from this area or so they thought.  On a Monday morning, my friends (husband and wife) had made their plans to retreat to the south and headed to the storage lot to pick up their camper and begin preparing for the journey to the winter home.  After entering their security code at the gate of the storage lot, the gate opened, and my friends drove to the numbered spot where they had parked their camper.

When they arrived at the numbered parking spot, they were stunned to find the camper was not there.  Before panic set in, they decided to drive all around the lot to see if maybe their camper had been moved.  After circling the lot a couple of times and not spotting their camper they headed for the maintenance garage to see if maybe it had moved it inside there for some reason.  The door was locked but they could see through the window that the maintenance garage was empty.  They headed to the office of the storage lot only to find that no one was there.  So it is at this point that you start scratching her head and asking a lot of questions, is this the right lot, did I have the right number, did your camper get moved to a different lot and lastly the question that no one really wants to ask was it stolen?

My friends attempted to call the owner of the storage lot but no one answered and they had to leave a message.  Now panic turns to an angry frustration and impatience begins to dominate their mental landscape.  Since the lot owner could not be reached it was difficult to call the police without some confirmation that the camper had been stolen.  Minutes become hours and hours become days.  Finally, the storage lot owner returned my friend’s call and acting completely surprised confirmed that the camper had not been moved by them and had probably been stolen.  Now, we turn to the recovery phase and the call to the police.  This also turned out to be frustrating as the police told my friends that the lot owner had to file a missing property form (glad we are not being mugged here).

Once the storage facility manager arrived on the scene it was disclosed that the security cameras had been struck by lightning two weeks prior and the coded front gate was also not operating properly.  The manager told them that any combination of numbers would open the gate—freaking awesome!  My friends also discovered that the facility mangers had not done any form of inventory on the lot for the last month.  This all adds up to a cluster-fuck of errors and no actual security being done on the property.  You put your costly, hard-earned assets in the trust of a company who assures you that they will take the utmost care of them when in reality you could have just parked the damn thing in the worst alley of the shadiest neighborhood and it would have been as safe.

I know that I gripe about this kind of thing quite a bit but I feel that the trust and service offered to customers come in the form of snake oil sales pitches simply offered to get your business.  I mean seriously who doesn’t repair or replace key pieces of equipment such as security cameras, it’s not like you are guarding a serial pedophile here, this is your camper dammit.  And a security gate that anyone who can count to 10 can open, seems like an open invitation to take anything you want.

To make things even worse, the insurance company dragged their feet for over a month before finally making restitution on the lost camper.  It just feels like customer service and satisfaction is something that is fleeting in every type of business service or product offering today.  It’s funny that our money has the words “In God We Trust”, that very well might be as there are few others whom you can.  By the way, the stolen camper was never found, and I suspect it is now a mobile meth lab. As always, this is just my opinion.

Talk to Ya Later

The Grumpy Old Fart Customer @2019 All Rights Reserved