College in a Box

Like a mysterious and frustratingly persistent rash (see Mather Lather 2006) or an annoying kid sibling, Collegeboxes, the company that turned summertime storage into a boondoggle of epic proportions last year, is back.

Collegeboxes—proclaimed the largest national storage and rental business geared towards college clients (whatever that means) by The Wall Street Journal—has re-inked a contract with Harvard Student Agencies (HSA) to provide summer storage on campus. Their slick website promises three Justin Timberlake and Andy Sandberg-like simple steps—step one: put your junk in a box; step two: let them pick up the box; step three: they’ll deliver the box (and that’s the way you do it!). Whether this is an appealing marketing strategy or another massive boondoggle seems ambiguous.

Yet last November, over twenty Kirkland residents—who were forced to store with Collegeboxes because their building was being renovated last summer—found that storing their belongings was not so simple. In June, they blissfully, yet somewhat naively sent their prized possessions off to Box Limbo.

Their “junk” was lost and for three months Collegeboxes remained indifferent to their plight. But like vengeful Norse gods, a few intrepid Kirkland residents led an all-out war against the company—which ultimately proved more successful than their thus-far embarrassing efforts at CEB Risk. Predictably, their efforts were followed by the passage of righteously indignant legislation by our august Undergraduate Council (UC) (of course belatedly and only once UC leaders were completely assured of the initiative’s success). For a time it actually appeared that HSA and Harvard would sever ties with Collegeboxes, and that a UC position paper had, for once, actually made a difference.

But like a once-spurned lover suffering from the delusion that a mere year apart would relight the storage-lust lying dormant in the Harvard student body, Collegeboxes has returned. And this time, they have a “100 percent satisfaction guarantee.” Presumably as opposed to the zero percent satisfaction guarantee that they had last year.

But the company’s protestations ultimately ring hollow; they are still trafficking in promises of money. They don’t realize that they are also trafficking in emotions. After all, how can an insurance check for a few hundred dollars come close to replacing one’s trusty old college futon, spilled on after a particularly rambunctious meal, stained from a singularly ill-advised nocturnal encounter, or torn apart from an unfortunately un-housebroken pre-frosh? Sentimental value is more than a cliché. Especially to college students who leave the College with nothing but their ratty futons and memories.

We will not, cannot, and must not give in to Collegeboxes and HSA’s persistent e-mails or the frighteningly chipper customers in their advertisements. We must use our collective ingenuity and seek other means of storing our stuff. Perhaps we can use all of the empty shelf space in Widener Library now that so many books are archived by Google. The internet giant has found, after all, a way of continually increasing storage space with GMail. Perhaps Google could figure out a way for the storage space in House basements to magically grow as well. Or maybe we could fill the empty top floor of Massachusetts Hall with futons and couches now that freshmen will not be living there. The possibilities are endless.

But finding clever places to store our stuff does not answer the pressing question: What were the College and HSA thinking in rehiring Collegeboxes? The only possible answer we can come up with is that they are resting their hopes on the George W. Bush philosophy of bungling: “There’s an old saying… that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”