Most Vassar students make one crucial mistake during their time here: acquiring possessions. Oh, yes, it seems like a good idea to buy a towel to dry yourself off with, and flip-flops so you don’t get athlete’s foot while you dry yourself off, and laundry detergent so that your towel doesn’t smell like hot pits—but, as any good religious philosopher could tell you, worldly possessions are a fool’s game. The fact is, you may get to thoroughly enjoy your large collection of anime body pillows during the semester, but then, come summer, you’ll have to store them somewhere. And that was where I went wrong.
It seemed like a good idea, like a natural thing to do. I had gotten many dozens of friendly emails from College Truckers, one of the moving companies operating at Vassar last spring. So I decided to contract with them to store my many luxurious items (from the French designers Amazön and Targét), making sure to first carefully pack everything in the provided boxes. After all, because I was planning to study abroad, I would be gone for both summer and fall. Therefore, it was important that my collection of 250 gold-plated tongue scrapers found a comfortable home while I was away.
The trouble began, as it always does, when I came back to Vassar. I had received no communication from College Truckers for many moons, so I reached out to them, only to discover after a long interval that they believed that my items had been delivered in the fall. Communication was hampered somewhat by the fact that the crack College Truckers customer service team is located in the Philippines, where enjoying lumpia and halo-halo is a far more enticing way to spend one’s time than answering emails from angry Americans. I made up for this by reaching out to them several dozen times a day, reasoning that if the squeaky wheel gets the grease, then I was going to squeak, dammit.
When my plane landed at JFK—never a good sign, by the way, in any situation—I refreshed my email and received a crucial notification: The company known as College Truckers no longer existed. Its website is live at the time of writing, and you could even try to schedule a pickup if you so desired, but the operation is kaput, finito, deader than the succulent I stored over the summer of my first year. Luckily, a friendly woman in the Philippines directed me to Jacob, the former CEO, to whom I was supposed to refer my inquiries.
So I did. Aggressively. I knew that Jacob, being far from the Philippines, could not be distracted by any delicious snacks, and yet he was even less responsive than the customer service department had been. Clearly, he was a mustache-twirling villain of the most heinous variety; perhaps he was enjoying my life-size anime posters for himself, or else fleeing to Brazil with my money. So I did what any reasonable, level-headed American does when confronted by the slightest inconvenience: I threatened to sue him, twice. I’m not proud of it, but when an enormous collection of 18-inch-high “Nekopara” figurines is on the line, you gotta do what you gotta do.
Eventually, cowed by the prospect of litigation, Jacob connected me to Vassar’s former on-campus College Truckers representative, who told me that he could help me get my items, but also that he did not own a car. Doubting his ability to carry them from Fishkill to Vassar on foot, I instead asked a friend for a lift, and the three of us drove down together one morning. At last, I was reunited with my possessions. And you know what? My palette-load of sour cream and onion Bugles hadn’t even gone stale yet!
So all’s well that ends well. Yes, the dastardly Jacob escaped punishment, but at least his terrible company is dead in the water. The “College Truckers warehouse” turned out to simply be a dirty, unheated self-storage unit—and, by the way, it was still filled with people’s stuff, so y’all really need to be a little more assertive. If you ever do make the mistake of owning something and need storage for said thing, do yourself a favor and reach out to the Vassar offices; they’ll recommend a reputable company. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a heavily-stained copy of “Shonen Jump” to leaf through for the five thousandth time. Ah, reunion is sweet…
I graduated in ‘68 and in those days we were able to buy wooden crates for summer storage that would be delivered to our new dorm rooms by the time we returned for the fall semester. We were able to store lamps, typewriters, etc. in the dorm’s storage rooms and our bikes in the basement. My only problem with this system is that my bike was stolen from Jewett’s basement the summer after my junior year. I had a shiny new bike for my senior year, paid for by my insurance.