On 11/22/2013, a Friday, as I went to retrieve personal belonging, I personally witnessed Niagara Falls taking place over my storage space at this facility. Water was pouring over my rented storage space and its contents from above due to a water boiler explosion (as I was told by a Public Storage employee, Betsy). It was totally un-parallel to the sole purpose of entrusting to a public storage facility - watching helplessly as your personal belonging being damaged by the place that your entrusted.
I demanded to speak to a manager but was told to contact District Manager, Dave Smith. However, Betsy told me not to call him that day because Dave Smith was in a "Big Meeting." I was told to call him the next day, even though it was Saturday. Betsy apparently thought her boss's schedule was more important than my unexpected emergency I was facing at the time. Her attitude indicated her untrained customer service to this type of unexpected emergency at the facility.
I called Dave Smith on Monday. Mr. Smith was, at that time, accommodating regarding my dire situation for my water-damaged storage space. I requested for a temporary space so that I could relocate temporarily my damaged contents in order to assess the water damage,to which he accepted. I also request that he replaced my damaged file-storage boxes, to which he accepted too.
Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, something that nobody really wanted to do, I personally went to view the damages storage space. As I removed the legal file boxes, one by one, I observed many water-soaked boxes. I requested for some replacement boxes to replace the damaged boxes, to which Betsy (the same Betsy) reluctantly acquiesced. Reluctantly because Betsy warned me that she was running out of file boxes to display so she had to keep a tight control over releasing them to me. As a result, I could not replace each and every water-soaked box. I spent three hours on this Thanksgiving Sunday replacing file boxes, and relocating over 100 boxes to a temporary storage to a different floor. The replacement boxes were too small and of low quality (they felt like made of crackers) compared to my original damaged boxes.
Later, during the week, I contacted Dave Smith and requested that Public-Storage offer a credit for the inconvenience (time, energy and substituted, cheap, replacement boxes) that it had caused me. Then, on Friday, the same week, Mr. Smith rejected my request. Dave Smith did not even have the courtesy to call me personally on his refusal to credit me. Rather, he had an employee call and the employee even warned me that the current monthly payment must be paid that same day, or I will face a late charge (which turned out to be a laughable 20%).
Today, as I returned to Public-Storage to further examine my damages, I experienced the most embarrassing and humiliated moment as a paying customer of Public Storage. When I requested for only 6 more replacement boxes, a man in the office said to me why I needed that many boxes when they had already given me 15 boxes. The man refused to provide me any more boxes. He blatantly told me to claim all my damages through insurance. Without identifying himself, the man demanded to see my storage space to see why I needed that many boxes. When I asked if he was Dave Smith, he replied no. The man merely identified himself as "Ravinder. I am the Senior District Manager." I asked him to write his name for me, to which he answered, "I will write it for you later." (He never did.) I reminded him that Public-Storage's cheap replacement boxes do nothing to compensate at all my losses from the water damage and that, now, he had just played hardball tactic. The time to replace, relocate, and re-relocate file boxes are immeasurable and worth more than a few, additional, cheap replacement boxes from Public-Storage. He had just made me feel like I was profiting from the facility for merely asking for a few more cheap boxes.
Upon viewing my damaged space and personal belonging, Ravinder continued to insist that my boxes were not damaged, but were overloaded, despite my disagreement that he should know the difference between a crushed box (from overloading) and a soaked-through box as indicated by the box's soft appearance. Seemingly, he was placing the blame of damaged boxes not upon the water-boiler explosion, but my overloading of file boxes. Never at any time did Ravinder show any sympathy to me about the situation that Public-Storage had caused me.
After I cleared out of the temporary storage space and relocated all my file boxes to original space, the man, Ravinder, was nowhere to be found in the office. He disappeared without leaving his name. It was not until another request was made for his name that his true name was written by one at the front desk as Ravinder Singh with his phone number as 718-858-4385. I wasted 3 hours.
What a pity showing from these levels of employees at Public-Storage. read more