Category: A Space Apart

I furnished my last design studio with bespoke Danish shelving, three Eames desk units, nine glass tables, 12 chairs, etc. When I closed the studio I moved the furnishings plus a few hundred design books—including books I’d written, foreign translations of my work, books by other designers that I’d published, translations of some of those books, oversized and rare design books, books signed by their authors and sent to me, and so on.

I could not fit the Danish shelving into my apartment—hell, it’s too large to fit into the elevators in my building. I gave away the Eames Desk units and fancy chairs. I managed to drag home my tulip chair and ball chair. Everything else went into a storage unit in Chelsea. It was an easy walk from my old studio to the Chelsea storage unit, and a healthy walk from my apartment to the unit. Every month I paid around $400 for the privilege of storing the stuff.

When companies buy other companies, employees and customers lose big.

At some point Chelsea Storage sold out to another company, which then sold to a third company, located somewhere in the middle of the Bronx.

That company didn’t tell me they’d moved my stuff, did not contact me about it, and certainly did not obtain my consent before moving it. I assume they were equally cavalier with the other existing customers. They didn’t even send a new contract.

Instead, they jacked up the monthly rate to $500 and began charging my old studio zeldman company card. I didn’t notice, and I cancelled the card soon afterwards, as you do when you close a business. Oops!

When their automated bills to me stopped getting getting paid, they naturally took responsibility for their mistake and reached out to me cordially.

I kid of course. What they did was send my account to a collection agency.

Ring-ring, my telephone’s talking.

When the agency reached me by phone and I inquired politely who they were (remember, nobody had contacted me), they explained grudgingly that I owed a few thousand dollars in back rent on the storage place I’d never heard of and had never contracted with.

I asked, what if I remove my stuff from your unit? They said, you can’t remove it until you pay us the back fees.

I went into debt to do so—at the time my partners and I were saddled with painful closing costs from shuttering our conference and publishing companies, so it was just more kindling for the big fire of business debt.

Once I got the money together to pay them off, they sent me a new two-year contract. I had no choice but to sign it.

A brief calm settled in. For a time, $500 flew out of my bank account every month and was directly deposited to these crooks’ account because I now had an ironclad contract with them and there was no other place to put my stuff.

I never visited the location or looked at my stuff. The whole thing might be a scam. For all I know, they set the old units on fire and are billing me for an imaginary storage space.

In any case, I’m an adult and a professional, and I don’t want my credit hurt any worse by debt than it has to be, so naturally I continued to pay them, telling myself I would shop around and find a closer and more affordable storage option soon, but this would do for now. And now, as is its frequent habit, soon stretched into years.

Bad business, meet bad software.

Then about six months ago, the company either changed their name again, or sold to a new owner, or for some other reason (rabies? astrology?) decided that since auto-pay through my bank worked fine and got them paid each month, they would stop using it.

Whatever the rationale, they stopped accepting payment from my bank and sent a boilerplate email telling me to visit their new custom payment website and leap backwards through my own anus each month to pay their increased fee with the least convenience possible.

Listen. There’s good payment software out there. You know it. I know it. My company makes some of the best, and, before I joined Automattic, my old studio had a partnership with another great shopping platform. But people who buy storage units without informing their customers don’t use or know about such things. They typically find some terrible software that’s built cheaply, quickly, and badly, and that’s what these folks did.

Remember: Good UX is what companies do when they have to. A company that has your stuff locked away doesn’t have to.

You’ll never guess what happened next.

Their new website has never ever worked for me.

Thus, every month I get an automated, threatening text demanding immediate payment via their website that never works. Every month I try.

I squander a good 20 minutes trying to log in. Every month the terrible website no longer accepts my password. Every month I create a new password which sometimes works for that month only, and then never again, and sometimes doesn’t even do that. (Because the new password process demands access codes and other information they have never sent me, so I cannot provide it.)

Inevitably, every month I reach out to them, explain the situation—not the part about them being shitheads whose business model is extractive and whose lousy business practices undoubtedly violate dozens of consumer protection laws. I never complain about any of that, because why burden an overworked phone operator, who has naught to do with the company’s policies? Besides, you attract more flies with honey, etc. So I just tell them—as if it is news; as if it hasn’t happened every month before—that I’m locked out of the site so cannot pay them, and politely ask them to send me a new temporary password so I can pay them.

Invariably they ignore me at first, because of course that’s what a company like this would do.

Typically they phone me a few dozen times—but I never pick up when they do. Eventually, they do what I asked. Which enables me to send them $500 that one time. Next month I’ll face the same hassle. And every month after that. For the privilege of believing that my precious book collection and those glorious shelves still exist somewhere, safely housed from storm and fire and mildew.

I know the solution is to journey to the Bronx twice: First time, to see if I even have a storage unit at the place, what’s in it, and what options I may have. (Switch to smaller, cheaper unit? Drag everything to the street?) Second time to take every stick of furniture out of their shitty business and find other places for it. Assuming any storage business in NYC behaves ethically, of course. Which, hey, eventually, with our new mayor, may happen. But hasn’t yet and I wouldn’t lay odds.

And whenever I actually have enough days off in a row to consider tackling this problem and putting it behind me, something else comes up—I’m sick, or my kid’s sick, or I just don’t feel like traveling to the Bronx to argue with some nice person who needed a job and has nothing to do with the bullshit their company inflicts on its customers. (After all, the company is likely even shittier to its employees than it is to its customers.)

For years, now, this thing has been like a small cancer in my life—like a painful wart in a private place—and I still can’t bring myself to deal with it. Blame it on PTSD and anxiety disorder. Anyway:

I never make new year’s resolutions but hear me now: Before this year ends, I will resolve this, if only just to symbolically give the finger to every low-down, chiseling, extractive business in Christendom as personified by these feckless fucks.

First post of 2026: Done. Apologies for not writing it prettier.

Bonus treat: studio.zeldman 3D walkthrough ℅ Roland Dubois.