Here is the next installment from our students starting up their business. After successfully bidding on E-Bay, they now are waiting for the truck to arrive with their equipment being shipped from Colorado. Catch the entire reverb story at this link.
I got a call from Becky Gann on Friday, January 2, 2004, to tell me that the semi carrying our equipment would be here the next morning. I was supposed to meet the truck at the Public Storage Unit on Charlotte Avenue at 9:00 the next morning. I asked my little brother Jacob if he wanted to go with me since it wasn?t going to take very long. I promised him a meal at Caesar?s Ristorante Italiano after we were finished.
The next morning Jacob and I headed to Nashville from Dickson. We arrived at the storage place and we found our unit. It was all the way in the back. I had to drive through several twists and turns to get back there. We then came back around to the front where we met Becky and one of her friends. She had some more paperwork that the driver needed to be signed. After another five minutes waiting, a blue and white North American Freight semi stopped in the median on Charlotte Avenue. The driver jumped out and met us. He began to look around the place to see if he could pull the semi through. After walking through the path and looking at the diagrams in the main office, he decided that he would give it a try.
This is where the real fun started. The driveway was pretty narrow with concrete curbs on both sides and two yellow metal poles coming out of the pavement on the left. The main office was straight in from the road with the bend in the driveway less than 3 feet from the side wall. He decided to give driving into the place a shot, but he couldn?t make the turn sharp enough. He was just a couple of feet from running straight into the main office building. He got out of the truck and then started to measure the distances on each side of the truck. He then explained to us that his truck had a loading dock attachment at the back. Because of this his back axles were fixed in place. He told us that if he was in a regular truck, he would just move the axles to make the turn sharper.
He decided to try once again, but this time he would try to pull in from the opposite direction. Becky, her friend, and I blocked off traffic on Charlotte Avenue so that he could back up. We saw him driving off into the distance, and then we lost sight of him. About five minutes later we see him coming down the street. He flew past the storage place without even stopping. We all looked at each other thinking what is he doing? Did he forget where we were?
After another five minutes or so he came back in the original direction and he parked the semi in the median again. He got out and told us that he could not make it. He suggested sending the shipment down to Atlanta where they would load it on a smaller truck. This was going to cost a couple of hundred dollars so he also suggested that he could pull over at a vacant Big Lots just down the road. From there we could unload the semi into a smaller truck and then take it over to storage.
Becky called two of her friends who said that they would help. About an hour and a half later (See the next installment for the conversation with the truck driver to see how we wasted this time), they arrived with a small Toyota pickup and a moving van. We had to unload the semi onto the truck and van. Then we had to drive over to the storage place and unload it into our storage unit. The hardest part was handling the metal legs and sides for the CD racks. They were surprisingly heavy. The back of the pickup was riding very low with all the metal in it. We made several trips back and forth between Big Lots and the storage place moving all the racks, boxes, and other equipment.
What I thought was going to take two hours at the most ended up taking almost six and a half hours. We finished up at the storage place about 3:20. I still kept my promise to take my brother to Caesar?s though. We got there right at 3:30 when they started closing up and getting ready for dinner. Jacob and I were the only ones in their while everyone else was cleaning up. Jacob was a big help that day and I felt bad that it took his whole day. I asked him what I could do for him. We decided that I would also get him a Gary Allen CD.
Joe Drake