I have helped move friends a thousand times, and I cannot tell you how I wished there was something like pods storage back then. Most of us had to recruit friends to help, because we were starving students at the time. Pizza and cheap beer were the payment for filling the moving truck. The friend was often not packed, due to procrastination and perhaps a party the night prior. We had the more cerebral task of actually driving the truck in public, after the manual labor of loading everything in a moving truck. It continues to amaze me that a person who has a normal non commercial drivers license is allowed to rent one of these big trucks and drive it through public streets. You hear everything crash down in the back as soon as that truck hits the road, and you know your friend wishes she would have let someone else drive. I guess we should not have put the framed pictures between the bike and the air hockey table. If only there was some kind of pods storage, so you would not have to worry about driving all this stuff around and breaking it.
I now pay professional people to move me, which makes my friends and me very happy. It is considerably more expensive that renting a truck and having your friends help you move, and you have to be organized. You can pay someone to pack up your entire house and move you, or you can have your stuff packed and have the movers take care of the rest. It is a whirlwind of chaos, no matter what you choose. The movers will start wrapping things up and packing them together, if they see anything not packed. After one of my moves, I opened a box to find a plastic trash can (wrapped in paper) that had trash still inside it. My movers charged for every box, roll of tape and swath of paper used. Had I known about pods storage, I could have done things my way.
I have seen more and more of these pods storage things on the streets of the city.I guessed it was mainly students who did not want to pimp out their friends services to help them drive a truck around. Then I was personally introduced to the world of pods storage via some friends who needed to move back to the West Coast. In exchange for dinner and wine, we graced them with our packing skills for an entire afternoon. We took most of the boxes down the stairwell to the pods storage box parked out on the street. The storage unit was outside their apartment for a week, so they were able to slowly take thing downstairs and get them organized in the thing. It was a very secure cube, with a heavy frame and a huge lock. No one could get into the thing unless he had a forklift and just wanted to take the whole thing. Whatever was too heavy or cumbersome to take care of ourselves, was moved into the pods storage cube by some people they hired. The pods storage company put the unit on a truck and away it went to the West Coast. Our friends did not have to contend with a chaotic day of movers at their apartment, and they did not have to learn how to drive a huge truck. See, pods storage is for grown ups too. You might still have to spring for beer for your friends.