Happy Birthday tinobeat!

[Patrick]

Can't believe I almost missed this one. 27 years old! Believe it or not, that seems incredibly young. Enjoy it...

Patrick

[johansen smith]

Feliz Birthidad!

[vesper]

happy birthday and good movings!!

[earl grey]

happy birthday tino!!

[pabost]

Happy bday, Tino! Thanks, again, for the Cambridge advice.

[Salman]

Happy birthday. Thanks, again, for the Gris Gris advice.

[winterversion]

Happy Birthday dude!

[maroonwalrus]

Happy birthday dude, hope you had a good one.

[Miss Tasty Princess]

Happy What They Said!

[Paul]

Where's Funk? He's got the birthday paddle.

Happy day of birth!

[Lukas]

happy birthday man,















....and many more [hand waving motion thingy].

[bitterfruit]

Yo Yo,

Best birfday wishes!

[Futureman]

Dear Tino,

Everything's here. Wish you were great.

Happy Birthyday, pal.

~Futureman

[SarahRide]

Happy birthday, Tinobeat!

[the Pawnbroker]

Happy Birthday, tino!

[tinobeat]

hey thanks folks! shucks...

I just finally got back on the computer for the first time in about 4 days.. my birthday was mired down in what was possibly the most harrowing move I've had to date, but my peeps in Cambridge gave me a nice birthday/moving-away BBQ on saturday night which punctuated the 4 days of moving and sweating and cursing nicely...

missed you all!

Oh, and just to reprise my awful day 1 on the move (which necessitated having 3 more days of what should have been a 1-day move), from a post on another message board:

So, I'm sure this has happened to plenty of others, but I have to rant about the fucking horrible move I had yesterday. this'll be long, whatever, I've gotta piss and moan, so yeah...

Two weeks ago, the lady and I reserve a truck for yesterday morning for our move to Providence. Wednesday night they call and say it might be a bit delayed, maybe noon instead of 8. That's fine, whatever. So at 11 we call and ask about the truck, they say they're sorry, its not in yet, they'll call us. We get antsy, but hey, we've got some last things to get ready, so an extra hour or two wouldnt' kill us. At 1PM we go down to the U Haul, just to make sure we get an answer to our face about when we can get a truck. Same crap, "we'll call you, blablabla." So what? 5PM? 6PM? I took the day off work, we're moving across state lines, time's getting tight, we say. "We'll call you.." So we decide that they can go screw and we call other U Hauls. They're all giving us the same crap (granted, we didn't make reservations with them, so that's no surprise). So we call U Haul in fucking Providence, they have tons of trucks, so we drive down to get it so we can DRIVE BACK and then pack and DRIVE BACK. The mileage would be over double what we would have paid for. We tell the folks in Provi we only want to pay for what we would have paid one-way from Cambridge, cos it was their fuckup, not ours, that led us to this. They say we have to take it up with U Haul HQ. fine, fair enough, I don't want to beat on some poor fucker working at the place in Providence for something he didn't do, he was being real nice.

So we get the truck, finally. Its about 3:30 at this point, and we're really hoping we can get it all done by some sane hour, as I had to be in Cambridge via Commuter Rail this morning, which meant waking up at 6AM. I digress...

We're driving the truck up from Provi, stop in Attleboro to fill up the tank, I drop $50 in gas, and the truck... won't start. A guy at the station agrees to try to jump us, it does nothing. He looks under the hood (his truck was had the same front-end as the U Haul), tinkers around, figures the starter died or we blew a fuse, so we call U Haul emergency service, I spend an eternity trying to explain where we are and how the truck wouldn't start. They tell me they've made the call, a mechanic would be there soon, sorry for the inconvenience, etc. etc. So we sit for 40 minutes, there's nothing, so just for shits n giggles we decide to try to start the thing again, and wtf? it starts. So we high-tail the motherfucker out of there, and as we're going, we call the shop that's supposed to come help to tell them not to worry about that call. "What call, we never heard anything from Emergency Services folks" they say. At this point we decide we shouldn't pay for a fucking penny of the trip. But at least the truck's moving. We finally start packing our whole goddamn lives into the truck around 6, praying that the shit'll start once we get it done, so we can get back to Provi.

Somehow, miraculously, we were able to drive down, unload and drop the truck off by 1AM, but Jeezus Holy Christ, we should have been DONE some 8 hours earlier. I got 3 hours of sleep last night because of this shit. GAAH.

I'm calling U Haul today and tearin balls... fuck them...

ok, that's all.

[Salman]

Wow. That's rough. Hopefully U-Haul will throw something your way after all this.

[bitterfruit]

July and August are the busiest months for the truck rental industry. Not that any of the shit you had to go through was expected or anything though.

Pay for as much big shit as you can with American Express. Without having to get into it with U-Haul, you can just call AMEX and contest the charges saying that you weren't satisfied, etc. They'll instantly give you a credit for the total amount and contest it with U-Haul on your behalf. I had to do this once with a hotel in Europe recently for some fucked up reasons. I ended up not paying for the stay.

The other thing that I would consider doing is blogging about it. Seriously. Corporations are paying attention to the world of bloggers through forums like Technorati, IceRocket, and Feedster. Dell is known to respond to unhappy customers through this medium.

I created an entire blog last year dedicated to a local car dealer that I was having problems with. I got a complete refund, gave the car back, and had my laughs along the way.

[tinobeat]

yeah, I know its busy in July and August (and esp. Sept 1 in the Boston area). we thought we were being clever by choosing a random weekday to move, and were naive by, you know, expecting U-Haul to honor the reservation we made weeks in advance.

good to know about the Amex thing. I'll have to look into that.

maybe a U-Haul-sux.blogspot.com page isn't so bad an idea... I do want to stop stewing over it, though, I hate getting that angry...

[george]

happy birthday m-cat. how old are you now? and why isn't there a picture of the bithday cake guy in this thread?

[tinobeat]

I'm rocknroll death age: 27

[S M @]

Happy birthday anyway, TB. U-Haul is the worst. Other companies cost like twice as much, but most eventually find it's worth it since they actually pay attention to maintenance. The gov't around here is finally cracking down on them and closing the commercial vehicle law loophole that exempts them from inspections.

Most people only have one of the reservation problem or the breakdown problem. You were lucky enough to get both.... I've personally been involved in two moves (not mine) where one broke down. And only one sans breakdown with them, and that move was less than a mile. And I actually saw a U-Haul getting hooked up to a tow truck on the side of the highway a couple of months ago.

[otto midnight]

i can remember offering to buy an underage tino drinks at the middle east! there's just no way. 27? nope, can't be.

happy belated, spec bebop.

[tinobeat]

yeah, damn... I was 20 at the time.

it was night 2, I believe, of the 2-night built to spill stand at the middle east. it was the first time I had a drink at a show. *sigh*

the memories!