“It’s kinda dark in here”
As many universities across the country force students to move out of their on-campus housing, an unlikely hero of the coronavirus pandemic has emerged: U-Haul. According to CNN, the moving and storage company “is offering 30-day free self-storage to students with college IDs.”
This amazing deal kills two birds with one stone by giving students a place to store their belongings before they can travel back home. But more importantly, it allows them to simply self-store themselves in quarantine for a month, helping to prevent any further spread of COVID-19.
One drawback of living inside a storage unit for a month is that the facilities leave the lights off inside the units most of the time to save on energy costs. Luckily, most college students are very used to doing nothing but staring at their various screens in the dark, so this shouldn’t require too much acclimatization on their part. However, #uhaulLife has drastically changed how students interact with social media.
“Posting on Snapchat and Insta without my friends just isn’t the same,” said first-year studies studies major Brian Onpauz in a phone interview. “I like getting together with my friends so I can post pics and stories of myself with my friends so my other friends can see what a good time we’re all having. But since I’m all by myself in my storage unit, I have to go on social media all by myself, which is kinda lonely. Plus, seeing posts from all my friends all by themselves as well is just way too boring, and this actually gave me a bad dream that me and all my friends are actually just boring people. It was such a relief when I woke up from that nightmare!”
In addition to electricity, chronic boredom and chronically boring people, other problems including sanitation, plumbing and sewage have presented extreme challenges for the managers of U-Haul self-storage facilities. For more on that, please check out our extended coverage on The California Aggie Overtime, where we interviewed students who have experienced the best and worst of U-Haul’s waste management practices.
Written by: Benjamin Porter— bbporter@ucdavis.edu
(This article is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional. The story and the names of “sources” are fictionalized.)
