A Lesson on Moving

A few years ago I needed a moving truck. I went to U-Haul’s website and began the process of booking a truck for the weekend of my move. I was pleasantly surprised at the ease of reserving. It seemed as though their online “Reserve a Truck” system was state of the art and very user friendly.

When the day came around to pick up the truck, I had my wife drive me to the pick-up location. She waited in the car while I went inside to finalize the paperwork. After about 20 minutes she came in to see why I hadn’t driven away in our reserved truck. We found out that the location that was supposed to have my truck didn’t have one in stock. I didn’t expect this because I gave U-Haul my credit card number when I reserved the truck 2 weeks prior to that day.

This wouldn’t have been a major problem if I had lived in a big city and could have just gone to another pick-up location, but at the time I lived in a small town which was 2 hours from the next U-Haul site. This now became a major problem because I had arranged for laborers to help load the truck.

To make a long story short, 5 hours later I pulled up to my house with the truck.

The lesson I learned:

A seemingly “good system” doesn’t work if it’s not predictable. Predictability in systems instills confidence in employees, customers and all end users. In my case, U-Haul had an online system that was easy to use. However, their system for fulfilling on their orders was unpredictable. I lost confidence in their “easy system” because of the unpredictable outcome.