(February 7th . . . move there)
Last night, after I got off from work, I quickly drove to the storage unit to retrieve two Transformers I had sold (they were Crasher and Blurr, since you asked. Why are you so oddly curious about them?), and as I pulled in, I found an open unit a couple rows away from mine. There tend to be open empty units all the time, because their owners have cleared them out and not bothered to close the doors, since (presumably) they're just going to get opened and inspected anyway. But this one was not empty . . . it was still full of stuff.
I was pressed for time (twice I've been locked inside the property for staying later than ten o'clock--once it was literally 10:00 and the doors wouldn't open to let me through), but I paused for a few seconds outside their unit, shining my highbeams on the contents, wondering if someone was transferring the inventory to another space and had just left it open since it was night and no one was around, or if someone had accidentally left their unit open (which seems extraordinarily unlikely. You see, the reason people pay so g.d. much for someone to store their stuff month to month is because it is valuable to them (presumably more valuable than the price to store it - though, in my mom's unit's case . . .), so even if you didn't have a lock*, you'd surely close the door, and hope no one would notice (which they wouldn't, I mean, come on).
Well, I saw a bunch of items sitting in the darkened unit, but nothing that jumped out at me enough to go in there at night and risk getting locked in the property and/or murdered by the madman who lives in the unit (he's in space 214, by the way). I raced over to my own space, opened and grabbed the Transformers (they were the Walmart exclusives from 2022. Why ask for all these details? Are you interested in buying them? If so, why did you wait until someone else did?), then left with six or seven minutes to spare.
I did sell something in the night (no, I don't remember what it was. Do you need me to look it up? Is it that important?), though, so I drove back again the next morning, hoping to get it packaged up and in the mailbox before the postman came. But that abandoned storage unit was still open, still stocked, and seemed to have been untouched since the night before. So, I parked outside it, and went to investigate.
It had been cleaned out of anything valuable, but there were still several books, packing materials, a bunch of plastic containers, some clothes, and a little coffee table-sized shelf, along with what was surely garbage they hadn't felt like hauling off. I opened one of the plastic containers, just to see, and it held a bunch of family pictures in it.** Odd that they would be abandoned, but you never know the backstory on these things.
I found nothing of value--to me, anyway--and the only thing I took was a five or six foot stretch of bubble wrap, which I could easily use the next time I sell a Transformer (Um, okay, the series was called Velocitron 500. They were in a blue package. If you like them all that much, I'll hook you up with a deal, okay? Just get off my back and let me blog). I was again curious why a non-empty unit would be left open, but in a world where little makes sense, you can drown in the rising tide of How Comes.
But you may be asking, why did I share this stupid post with you, if you didn't find anything and nothing of interest ever happened (except for a reader being bizarrely curious about the overpriced action figures I sell, jeez!)? Well, I can't help but think about what I might have found.
Either something crazy-precious and costly, or something super-creepy and upsetting. As I went on my run tonight, I thought there had to be a story in there, of stumbling upon something where I would spend the rest of my days regretting being curious and wandering into where I didn't belong. Of course, in a story it would have been night, and I'd have had ten minutes (or so) before the gates locked, so I'd have had no qualms about peeking into the darkened unit to see what was in there. And maybe I did find something valuable, something totally cool, and it caused me to lose track of time, and by the time I also discovered something disturbing or grisly, those doors would be sealed for the night.
And of course, the strange storage unit would not have been abandoned--the owner would have been nearby, perhaps disposing of a body, perhaps just getting more bubble wrap (so he could use them to dispose of a body). You never know.
*Twice I have dropped a lock after opening the unit and broken the key off, forcing me to go out and buy another lock. Twice.
**According to that Robin Williams movie, other than
the family pets, the first thing a family would rescue from a burning
house is their family photos . . . so maybe that movie was wrong?
