Dear Mr. Haul

I recently, once again, had the great personal misfortune to require the services of your local concern. This should come of no surprise to you – it is something of an American tradition to be in circumstances and, when one is in those circumstances, to turn to your network of shops to both aid the situation, and – by your design – to make the situation worse.

As I am sure you are fully aware, it is a universal truth that trucks rented from one of your fine establishments are just. the. worst. Some of that is certainly not your fault, sir! People use them for short term rentals, and I’m sure we don’t treat them well. But even still – one goes and rents one of your vehicles, and you think you’ve won the lottery: this truck only has 27,000 miles on it! Score! And then you turn on the engine and realize it may as well be the hinkiest, eight-owner, salvage title jalopy from 1972 that you’ve ever set eyes upon. It may as well have been pulled from the Cuyahoga River after at least eight months at the bottom, given a new coat of paint, and had decals slapped on, without having its mechanical parts looked at even once. Did you even raise the hood after hauling it out? I assume not.

To be honest, Mr. Haul, I’m not even that upset about the truck – that’s not even what I’m writing you about. But since I’m here, and you’re taking a moment to listen to me, we’re gonna talk about both the truck I was so honored to have been rented yesterday, and some memorable trucks you’ve rented me in the past. 

We can’t really talk about the first truck your wonderful associate tried to rent me yesterday - it didn’t have a license plate, so I didn’t even get past step one of the customer inspection. It may have run like a dream! No one will ever know, since it wasn’t street legal. 

The second truck your poor, frazzled associate – oh, and also, hire more people at your Renton, Washington location. That entire facility was being run by one very sweet woman who tried really hard and did an excellent job with what she was given, but as I’m sure you’d know if you ever set foot in your retail locations, transactions at your “fine” U-Haul stores take a very long time, and one single person cannot help three customers in any sort of short order. And I swear to god if you try to tell me that “people just don’t want to work anymore” then, Uriah – I assume your first name is Uriah – we’re gonna have to take this conversation outside.

Anyway, Mr. Haul, what was I talking about? Oh, right! The second truck. Consider that little digression there payment for the digression I had to take while your sales associate fetched me a street legal truck. This was not, somehow, the most memorably bad truck I’ve rented from you, sir! After my tow package was hooked up, I sat down in the driver’s seat, and –

Actually wait, let’s not get to the truck itself just yet. Let’s talk about the terrible, pointless aesthetics of the passenger cabs of your trucks. Specifically, two things. We don’t need to harp on the big printed stickers on the back wall, or the utilitarian rubber flooring straight out of a movie serial killer’s murdershack. Those are par for the course. Instead, I want to know, what in tarnation is up with the stupid, pointless “BEST M.P.G” efficiency dial. That pointless piece of claptrap has a dial that moves through 200 degrees or so, but it actually only has two settings – or at least seems to on any one of your jalopies I’ve ever rented. The two options are:

• Foot on the gas: RED RED RED YOU ARE PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HOLE IN THE OZONE LAYER WHY ARE YOU A HORRIBLE PERSON YOU ARE SO BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT ONE OF MR. CHEVRON’S LAWYERS IS GOING TO SERVE YOU WITH A LAWSUIT FOR MAKING IT SEEM LIKE OIL COMPANIES ARE ACTUALLY AT FAULT FOR GLOBAL WARMING
• Foot off the gas: gosh, you beautiful person, you’re so green Bambi is going to hop out of the woods and lick your face

Those are the two options. I drove that stupid rattletrap of a truck from Seattle to Portland and kept one eye on the dial the whole time, and it literally just whipped back and forth between those two options, depending on whether I was trying to pass another, somehow worse, U-Haul truck at the time.

The second thing that’s common to all your trucks is TOW/HAUL IS ON sticker/button/dial/light/whatever. I don’t know what that could possibly mean, I’m not sure what that possibly does, I haul things with my Wrangler all the time and don’t have anything like that nonsense. What’s truly remarkable about it, though, is that your trucks come with it ON by default, despite the fact that no one, not one solitary soul, has ever rented a U-Haul filled with the various trinkets and Ikea detritus that form a life in late-stage capitalism America. They literally always leave your facilities empty, sir. And then it says there on the sticker “WHEN DRIVING TRUCK UNLOADED, TURN TOW/HAUL ‘OFF.’” 

Sir. Do you think anyone has ever done that? No. No they have not. If we actually were supposed to do it, it wouldn’t be on by default, because the cavernous, beat-up, scuffed, scratched, marked, and mangled box parts of your “fine” box trucks always, always come empty as an orange cat’s thoughts as it lays on a table and regards the world. I swear to all the Gods that you only add that little direction in there, sir, so that your customers read it and start to sweat that they’ve done something wrong, that they’ve somehow ruined the beautiful truck that they rented from you. Maybe, just maybe, if they had, then parts wouldn’t fall off it randomly as they drove down the road; maybe the engine wouldn’t smoke and sputter, maybe the air conditioning would actually work in this one, but no. You, sir, you malicious genius, put those stickers on your trucks for the sole purpose of messing with your customers… and you know your customers have no other choice, if they’re renting one of your trucks, because literally no one would ever rent one of your trucks unless they had literally any other choice.

That sticker is just one of the little things that makes renting from you, sir, so obnoxious. Let’s also talk about the handy guide you give us in the little rental packet about how many gallons of gas it will take to bring the gas gauge back to where you rented it to us: I followed it before I returned the truck, and actually put less gas in than you recommended. And what did I find? Instead of filling the tank to five-eights full, it filled it to three-quarters full! Are you siphoning off the extra gas that everyone puts in the trucks and selling it on the black market to Mr. Shell? Is this some sort of circular game that you and Mr. Exxon are playing so that you can buy yet one more ivory snuffbox to gird your desk with, sir? One more piece of gold filigree to decorate your rococo manse with? Do you spend your black market cash thinking “only peons play 18-hole golf, fuck it! I’m expanding my private course to TWENTY SIX HOLES! Rupert! Fetch me my palomino, I’m riding to the golf club and ripping down the jaunty sign that says ‘The Nineteenth Hole’ because after I bulldoze another tract of low-income housing to expand my course, that sign will be a lie! Just like the lies I tell my customers!”

Now that I think about it some more, Uriah – can I call you Uriah, now, Mr. Haul? I feel like we’ve been talking long enough that we’re friends, and I can address you by your first name. No? Well fine. Anyway, I’m now wondering, sir – did you have horrible experiences in high school? When you were riding with your friends, and they had those “Grass, Gas, or Ass - Everyone Pays” stickers on the rusted bumpers of their beat up jalopies, did that settle into your little brain? Was that a formative bumper sticker for you, sir? But are you now so poisoned by capitalism that – even though we’ve already paid for the fact that, in our misfortune, we had to rent one of your trucks – that you expect gas from everyone you rent to on top of it? Perhaps, sir, if you did smoke some of – as I’m sure you call it – The Devil’s Tobacco you might realize that you don’t need that twenty-sixth hole on your private golf course.

Ahem. Anyway. The truck itself.

On the scale of hoopty from one to wine-drunk Jim Carrey on day six of a bender, in the alley behind the Dolby Theater, wondering why he didn’t get an Oscar for his performance in The Mask, this truck was only about a six point five. It wasn’t the worst truck I’ve ever rented from you, sir; no, that dubious honor goes to the truck I rented in New Jersey once, which had an expired registration, and blew black smoke, and when the cops pulled me over about it, would not turn off, even though I had the key out of the ignition. Those cops actually gave me tickets to give to you, like I was their errand boy. I passed those tickets along, as requested. This wasn’t that truck. This truck just had the standard problems that all of your vehicles do. You know, it’s the sort of truck where you step on the gas, really pound that pedal to the floor, and there’s a noticeable wait – not as long as it takes to read this letter, but… well, close anyway. After a geological age goes past, the tectonic plates slip, and the truck rattles off at 5.5 on the Richter Scale. The truck slowly accelerates, the engine revs, the dinosaurs die off leaving room for the Age of Mammals to begin, the engine gets to somewhere north of five thousand RPM…. and then finally it shifts into second gear. Rinse, lather, repeat, and after Rome has risen and fallen you’re actually moving fast enough to merge onto I-5. Pray god you don’t need to speed up after that, because you’re gonna have to wait for all the bishops to show up at the First Council of Nicea before the signal will get from the gas pedal to the engine… though of course the Efficiency Dial has already told you that you’re a puppy-murderer.

And oh, as this is happening, how the truck shakes, rattles, and hums! It’s practically a U2 album – though, in your defense, it’s not as bad as all that, for as terrible as your trucks are, they’re no Bono. He’s got that market sewn up. This particular truck shook and bounced and swayed so bad I actually couldn’t eat the fine cuisine of Mr. Bell that I picked up on my southward journey - I was practically seasick! 

And – let’s not forget the alignment! I had to fight this truck the entire way south to keep it from diving into the mighty Puget Sound. It wanted to run off the road so badly I can barely describe it - I actually amused myself on the drive wondering how large an empty parking lot I would need for it to make 360 degree circles all on its own, if I was just to sit on the seat keeping the gas pedal mashed to the floor. I rejected one of Mr. Wal’s parking lots - those are way too big, this truck wouldn’t have needed all that space. One of Mr. King’s would be too small, I believe the truck would have passed through the drive-through and likely ripped it’s top off had I tried. I eventually settled on your good friend Mr. Bass’ Pro Shop parking lots as the optimal size lot for this truck of yours to have spun a perfect witchy circle around, gently arcing through the evening for as long as it would run, with you only occasionally needed to top it up with gas money stolen from your other customers.

Now, sir, you might be thinking that I must be winding down, but I promise you, I haven’t actually even gotten to the reason that I’m writing you this letter! All of this, so far, is the forty-some years of bottled-up rage and desperation that have built up, after a lifetime of occasionally being in straits in which I have no choice but to come and rent one of your banger rust buckets. If it had only been all of this – why, I would never have written this letter at all! This, as the great David Foster Wallace said in that irritating college graduation speech, is water. These three and a half pages are simply that in which we swim – there would be no point in going out of my way to say any of this, because all of this is simply The American Condition in the year of our lord twenty-twenty three. 

Why I am actually writing this letter, sir, and what pissed me off to almost no end, is that in addition to being a greedy, money-grubbing Scrooge McDuck (sans feathers) who understaffs his offices, most likely underpays his staff, rents death-trap rattlebangers to desperate Americans who literally have no other choice, and has way too many holes on his private golf course, you, sir, are also a liar. A bait-and-switch motherfucker. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but this time, oh this time you’ve gone too far.

See, I had little choice in the matter. I had to go to your website and rent a one-way truck with an auto carrier, because I was in circumstances. And I filled out the forms and avoided all the add ons, I clicked all the clickies, and by the time I was done, I was presented with my reservation options. And there it was: special deal! Only $179! I had to return the truck to a specific place, but that was no big deal. So do you know what I did, sir? I clicked the rest of the clickies, gave you my credit card number, and reserved my truck from you. And – I should have known better.

Because when I got to your “fine” facility in Renton, Washington, then suddenly – magically! – the $179 reservation was ACTUALLY Four Hundred American Dollars. I do not live in Renton, sir. I don’t even live in Washington. I was stuck. And I hadn’t printed out the reservation, I hadn’t screenshot it, and even if I had, I imagine you, Mr. Haul, would have just shrugged and said deal with it, as if you were a gif of Nancy Pelosi with pixelated sunglasses. Do you know what I would have done, sir, if you had presented me with a $400 reservation in the first place? I would have paid it. I didn’t have a choice. No one actually has a choice when they go to you, sir. I would have cussed my office air blue, I would have yelled into jars, and I would have paid it.

Instead, since you knew I was in dire straits, you held out this little treat, this moment of “maybe the world won’t be so terrible” to me, and you let me get all the way to the hellhole that is Renton, Washington… and then you pulled back that treat, tripped me, and put the boot in while  I was down. 

Normally, I’d say “this should be illegal” and get all Norman Rockwell painting on your ass, but I am tremendously aware that the only law that exists in America is to protect rich Mr. Moneybags like yourself, and that there is literally no one who cares, or will do anything about it.

I assume, sir, that you know this as well, and that pulling your bait-and-switch nonsense on folks who have no other choice isn’t just business to you, but that it’s also a game. I bet you look out over your twenty-six hole golf course, sir, and feel no joy. I am almost certain, sir, that sticking the boot into customers who have no other choice but to use your service is the only thing that brings you joy in this life, and I curse you for it.

Oh, listen to me. “This time, you’ve gone too far.” As you’re well aware, what can I do? I can’t avoid circumstances, and I know that the next time I’m in them, you’ll be all too happy to take my money… and far more of it than you said you would in the first place. 

Sincerely,

Alex Parise