Thank you, thank you, thank you! Most helpful.
“You’re doing it again, dear.”
“What?”
“Lying and insulting me in order to get your way.”
I’m torn. Other people are giving good advice, but part of me likes to google. And googling this is easy. There’s homemade explosives. There’s fireworks. There’s untaxed cigarettes.
Ooo. This one has a Stradivarius . . . and drugs. I hadn’t heard that they found that. It just goes on and on.
Long list from a storage auction fan forum.
PD warning ofcriminal activities at storage centers. So if criminals have gotten used to using storage centers, and storage centers start asking for proof of identification because the police are pressuring them . . . some of them might be looking for alternative, less formal storage.
But that’s just part of me. Another part of me just doesn’t want to mess with other people’s boxes. I’ve had enough grief with relatives’ boxes.
To my mind, the bad thing that’s most likely to happen is that the jerk will stop paying. If there’s only a car in the garage and the jerk stops paying, you can roll said car out, park it by the curb, tell them to come pick it up, and pretend to anyone else that you don’t know how that got there.
If the jerk stops paying and you have boxes, things will not go smoothly. Was there a car and boxes? He’ll get the car and ask you to hold onto the boxes for just a little while. The garage is mostly empty, right? You can rent it to someone else, right?
Will your husband be the one to deal with the jerk? Will he be the one to go to small claims court when jerk claims that rats would not have made a nest of his expensive leather jacket if you and your husband had maintained your house and yard properly?
Then there are other questions. How are you going to find the jerk to rent the garage to? Ads? Flyers? Is there someone your husband has picked out already? Is it someone you know? Are you going to scan their driver’s license? Have them sign a contract? Warn them that 90 days after a missed payment their boxes are gone? Will they have access to your yard? Is there anything that they could steal once they have that access?
When the boxes are abandoned, will your husband quickly dispose of them? Or will he get around to dealing with them eventually? Around here that would include going through the boxes to be sure there wasn’t anything that was illegal to put in the trash and sorting recyclables. Then there would be an extra charge either for taking a load to the dump or for having extra trash picked up. Not something I’d want to mess with.
Every part of dealing with someone’s abandoned junk is harder if you’re trying to keep your landlord from finding out that you sublet. I would not want boxes there just because boxes (and bags, and stuff scattered around) are too much trouble.
Then again, if he’s willing to take care of things when things go wrong. And if he’s putting part of that $200 in savings for when that happens, it might be worth the risk. Personally, even then, I’d charge more for boxes.
I couldn’t disagree more. IMO you should always consider the worst case scenario, assign it a probability, and then decide whether the likely risk is worth the likely reward.
In the case of not flying because you’re worried about a plane crash, you’re probably grossly overestimating the chances of a crash, but if the fear of a crash makes flying an unpleasant experience, then that’s part of the downside, and it has a very high probability, so it needs to be factored in.
In the case of worrying about something going very wrong when renting space in your garage, I’d say that has a pretty high probability. Any single horrible scenario may have a low probability, but the aggregate of drugs/flammables/smells,leaks, or stains/vermin/payment disputes/abandonment/etc. seems not much worse than 50-50, especially when you factor in that whoever is renting the space almost by definition has something wrong with him, or he would use a regular storage unit, which has many, many advantages over a private garage.
ETA: I just googled the prices for my very, very small town, and the most expensive unit they have is $160/mo for 10x30, which is a lot of space. Anybody willing to pay $200 and take all the risks and inconvenience of dealing with a private party for storage sounds fishy to me.
In self storage units. Not in some stranger’s house that has access to it.
Self storage units are more apt to have cameras, security systems, computer-tracked entry/exit, and other record-keeping than some stranger’s house. As others have noted above, somebody who’s too wary to leave tracks at the U-Stor probably has some problems you don’t want.
In my part of the world, it’s not incredibly rare to find a meth lab in a motel room–there have been cases where the cops found two completely unrelated labs going in different rooms of the same motel at the same time. The maids have pass keys, their access to the rooms is entirely predictable, and the labs still go in. Cleanup costs can reach up to twenty grand for a single weekend’s cooking.
Of course, if you are subletting to somebody you know well who just needs a convenient garage (e.g., the neighbor down the block with three cars and a one-car garage), an entirely different calculus applies.
I was not discussing the logic or the content of the husband’s argument. I was discussing his tactics, which I consider from her description to be bullying. Since her description is all we have to go on, I don’t think my conclusions were unreasonable. She can easily dismiss what I said if she doesn’t think it applies.
Or perhaps you thought he was just engaged in some kind of horseplay, and that she was over dramatizing.
Roddy
The much more reasonable fear IMO than drugs, aliens or dead bodies in the trunk, is that someone will have access to your closed garage from which it is much easier to gain access to the rest of your house while you are away with complete privacy. It might not even be the renter- renter’s scumbag brother who knows where your rental is, and figures out which key gets him in.
That risk wouldn’t be worth it to me unless I was pretty desperate compared to the hundred or two you will get per month.
Wow. Thank you so much. This is very useful. I’ve heard of CBT but not DBT. Seriously, I am entertained by the discussion of To Rent or Not to Rent and everyone’s opinions about that, but this speaks to the original question I had, about handling this type of comment without getting upset. And probably in a more productive way than reading about debate tactics.
We talked it over further and made more progress this time. I said it seemed he thought I was saying that (drugs, guns, bodies, etc) was something very likely or certain to occur, but that isn’t my position at all. I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s such a ghastly possibility that we must pause and consider whether the risk is worth it.
I said we were wasting time arguing about how likely a bad scenario is to occur. And that probably we ended up exaggerating our positions because we were in an argument - he saying “It’s impossible!” and then me insisting over and over that it could happen gave the impression that I thought it would for sure happen.
We agreed that we have slightly different estimations of how likely a bad scenario is… mine a bit higher, his a bit lower… but the main disagreement is how much weight “worst case scenarios” have in our decision-making processes. To me, they’re something that absolutely must be thought of and spoken about and factored into decisions. To him, that process isn’t necessary since they’re things that probably won’t happen. And if they do happen, he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.
And I’m like, “That bridge has a meth lab on it, and it will blow up by the time you come to it.”
I feel like what people fight about is usually not what it seems like they’re fighting about. The true disagreement here is how to talk about risk - how much to talk about it - and how much to allow worst-case scenarios to dictate decisions.
Both of us recognize those are subjective topics. Which calms things down and leads us away from pointless speculative debate about how likely x scenario is. And toward a better conversation, where we try to understand each other’s thought processes and analyze our own.
You know, I agree it’s a dickish argument tactic. It’s one I’d like to never hear again.
I’ve got some majorly sneaky dickish argument tactics of my own. In this instance I have been the sputtering, upset party, but sometimes I play the role of disingenuous provoker.
I agree the real issue is not the garage, although I’ve appreciated reading people’s ideas about the pitfalls of renting it as well as people’s ideas about the underlying factors in the argument.
Those are good keyword terms. I got an eyefull. Sent him the links. His response was to say, “Okay, so that was 20 articles about drugs and dead bodies in storage facilities? Let’s round up and say a hundred. So let’s find out how many storage facilities there are in California, and get the percentage…”
Which is the response that Reply predicted toward the beginning of the thread.
But I found the articles edifying.
Yes! I agree. It wastes the other person’s emotional energy to have to defend against a faulty analogy… it’s exhausting to explain all the reasons it’s not applicable or analogous. Especially when you suspect the person with the faulty analogy knows it’s faulty and is pretending not to. I find myself exhausted and frustrated and agitated before I’ve even begun to talk about my position, because I have had to spend all this time undoing his mischaracterization of my position first. That was why I was looking for a rhetorical/debate term for this technique, so I could learn how to dismantle it without doing that.
Yes. And we made progress tonight.
HIM: Because these things are unlikely to happen, your concerns are not justified.
ME: Despite the fact that these things are unlikely to happen, they still might, so we should be concerned about them.
Which has less to do with proving the likelihood of events and more to do with our individual approaches to life. Which feels like a way more productive conversation and less like running in circles of speculation.
We agreed tonight to find out:
- Whether our lease specifically prohibits subletting;
- What the applicable laws in California are;
- Whether a contract someone signs saying we’re not liable for damage to their property actually releases us from liability.
Progress.
Right, would be drug dealers could care less about cameras in the hallway because all their stuff is concealed inside of boxes. There are no cameras inside the storage units themselves. And the only way management is getting inside your storage unit is with a pair of bolt cutters. And the only reason management would do this is if you’re late on your rent.
This is oceans apart from leaving it in some strangers garage.
And as far as meth labs in hotel rooms go, those things are manned 24/7, so any maid wanting to come in and clean, isn’t going to be able top do so because the people inside would stop her before she gets in the door.
Thanks for the links.
I seriously think that part of the reason we have such different views on this is that I’ve seen plenty of People’s Court and he hasn’t. I watched it as a child with Judge Wapner and I’ve watched it as an adult with Judge Marilyn Milian.
And you know what? This seems like exactly the kind of situation that would be on that show. And Marilyn Milian would call us fools for even doing this in the first place.
Maybe I should say, “You can be in charge of the whole thing, and handle it however you want, as long as you watch 15 episodes of People’s Court first.” 
I agree with this.
We put an ad on Craigslist. I’d be much more comfortable renting the garage to someone we know… in fact I’d have hardly an qualms at all about it.
When he posted the idea to his Facebook a few months ago, you know what we got? Several people who wanted to live in our garage (rent is astronomical in L.A.), and a friend of mine who manages property who warned us it was illegal without our landlord’s permission.
The garage is detached from the house. It’s at street level and our house is 40 stairs uphill.
I don’t think this is really a logic issue, and I don’t think he’s being a jerk. It just sounds to me like the two of you are approaching arguments like this from two different points of view. You’re talking about feelings. “I FEEL like this is a bad idea.” He’s talking about quantifiable data. “Show me evidence that this is a bad idea.” The correct response to this is, “My feelings are valid, even if they don’t make sense to you.”
I’ll use a personal example, so no judgments please! I have a rather intense fear of dogs. Right now, as I type this, I am totally aware that most dogs probably aren’t going to hurt me. But that didn’t stop me from basically breaking down into tears the last time our neighbor’s dachshund barked at me from a few feet away. Now my girlfriend, seeing this, has a choice. She can tell me I’m being ridiculous for being a 200 pound man who’s terrified of a 15 pound dog, which is true, but not particularly helpful. Or she can try to assuage my fears by telling me that the dog isn’t going to hurt me, but that she understands that my fear is very real to me. She chose the latter option, and I would expect your husband to do the same. Even if there has never been a case of a renter storing drugs in someone else’s garage, your concerns are real to you, and they obviously are not alleviated by him trivializing them. Why would they be? Nobody likes to be told that the way they feel is “wrong” just because somebody else doesn’t feel that way too. Even if he thinks you’re being absolutely crazy, he cares about your feelings, right? And as someone who cares about your feelings, the expected response to a concern of yours is something like, “I don’t believe that’s a concern, but since you do, let’s work together to find information that might make you feel better about this.”
Is $200 even realistic? It sounds a lot to me, just for storage.