Smug Karen Stored her Junk in MY Garage while I was Gone — I Posted “Free Pickup”

I pulled my car into the garage, pulled down the heavy door, and engaged the deadbolt, making sure now it clicked perfectly into place.

Your garage is not a complimentary storage unit because she did not want to rent one. People like Constance rely on everyone else being too polite to call their bluff. Was your solution extreme, OP? Sure, you could maybe say that, but she was given a chance to remove it. She ignored you, and then she acted like she had some divine right to your property. That's a classic case of F around and find out. Constance got exactly what she deserved.

A comment from Reddit said:

"You gave away what might have been someone's actual heirlooms and valuable property. So, yeah, she was wrong. Yeah, she was a nightmare about it. But you also posted free pickup, knowing full well what you were doing here. That is a weird kind of theft, even if it feels justified."

Another user on Reddit said:

"As someone with a detached garage, this made my blood pressure spike. People who don't have a workspace like that don't understand how personal it is. It is not just a garage; it is where all your tools are, where projects live, where everything has a spot. If I came home and found someone's basement clutter blocking my workbench, I would lose my entire mind."

You want me to drive a 34-ton mixer over a sand dune? Okay, sign here, please.

Concrete mixers are unwieldy, top-heavy, and spend a lot of time driving off-road with a shifting load. Consequently, we tend to try to pay a lot of attention to what we are driving on and where the customer wants us to go. What the customer wants and what we are physically able to do don't always meet, though.

The job site I'm working on is down near the Salton Sea. For those unfamiliar with Southern California history and geography, the Salton Sea is what happens when a man from Flint, Michigan hires a Canadian shipwright to dig a 60-mile irrigation canal and then digs a couple of illegal bypass channels right before one of the worst floods in the recorded history of the Colorado River. It has no outlet, and it's currently a fetid lake of salt, stink, and tilapia.

The customer, who we will call just Paulie, is building three greenhouses on sandy ground. The job mainly consists of chute-pouring post holes for the steel supports. It is slow work that's not helped by being next to the bog of eternal stench in one of the hottest and most humid parts of the state.

The lot is clearly blow sand—the refined stuff that gets carried by the wind. It's been graded smooth, but not compacted at all. So, basically, the lot is a sand dune with pretensions of civilization, and even the balloon tires on the tractors are digging in. I'm not taking my pig of a truck anywhere near that sand—at least not until I wind up in a really foul mood.

Luckily, the subcontractor is not stupid. He looks at the situation and decides to have me pour into the skip loader from the road. He knows that we cannot move my truck across that sand, so he's been having the loader ferry the concrete from my truck to the holes. It means that his crew has to shovel the concrete out by hand, and after the first couple of loads, they are going to look like the chain gang from Cool Hand Luke—without the benefit of Joy Harmon, of course. But since the owner didn't want to spring for a pump, it's the best option available.

Paulie doesn't show up until a couple of days into the job. When I pull up with my load, he tells me that what we have been doing is taking too long and he's got a different plan, a better plan: he wants me to back out over the dirt to pour the holes directly, because clearly that thought never occurred to us.

When I try to explain that the ground is too soft, he points at the tire tracks through the sand and says, "The last truck made it just fine."

Well, that is actually a lie. Not only that, it's an obvious lie. "The last truck made it" is one of the more common lies people tell drivers, right up there with "we can refill your tank with the water truck." They are practically memes similar to the jokes about inspectors being the enemy, just without the humor or benign intent. It's the difference between Al Bundy and Ted Bundy.

I know I'm being lied to, and what is worse, I'm being lied to incompetently. For starters, the tire tracks Paulie is pointing at were completely made by the loader, not a truck. And also, I was the last truck.

The way the job has been going, they've had one truck come out, pour the load, and then go back for the next one while the crew sets and aligns the posts in the holes. Paulie doesn't know this because he got there while I was off getting the next load. In fact, since this is his first time out here since we started, he has no clue that I'm the only driver that has been on this job since it started. This is one of those areas that doesn't bother with foppish fripperies like street signs or addresses, and on top of that, this job is on a flag lot, so it has a very narrow street-facing entrance.

I was on the job the first day, and since after that I knew where it was and he knew I wouldn't say no, my manager, Bob, asked me to do it on subsequent days so he wouldn't have to deal with lost drivers. So, Paulie is actually a bad liar, and I'm now in a really foul mood.

With my most obsequious smile, I say, "Oh, well in that case, of course. I just need you to sign the ticket before I can pull onto the property."

On my way back to the cab, I call Bob to see what else we have going that day. There isn't much other work, so Bob asks what is going on. I explain the situation, and Bob just asks one question: "Did he sign the ticket?"

When I say yes, he tells me to be careful and call him if we need a wrecker.