[00:07] Speaker 1: Welcome to the Junk Refund Show, hosted by Alan J. Cook, founder of 1-800-JUNK REFUND. Have you ever paid those expensive junk removal companies to take away some of your stuff only to say to yourself, as a truck drives off down the street, "Some of that stuff wasn't junk." Did they try to sell it for you and give you some money back? No. Well, now there is a company that can do just that. Listen to our weekly Junk Refund show on BBS Radio TV to learn how one lady spent $375 on junk removal and got $3,200 back. 1-800-JUNK REFUND represents the next generation of junk removal. Learn how to not only save your money on junk removal, but how to get some money coming back. Plus, purchase one of our radio vouchers during the show to save even more on your junk removal. Let's get the junk out of your home and out of your life. Now, with your host, Alan J. Cook.
[01:33] Speaker 2: Hello, everybody, and welcome to my favorite time of the week, Thursdays at three o'clock Eastern, where we get to do the Junk Refund Show, coming to you live from Muncaster Mill Road in Derwood, Maryland. And we have had a fun day with a few little hiccups, one little hiccup actually. (laughs) I'm gonna tell you about it in just a second. Um, 1-800-JUNK REFUND is a junk removal business, uh, in the Rockville, Maryland area. We service the entire country. We have 63 affiliates around the country. Our most recent one came on board yesterday down in West Palm Beach, Florida called All Out Junk Removal, a great lady named, a young lady named Jennifer. Uh, we referred her to a customer down on the, uh, east coast of Florida, just north of Fort Lauderdale, yesterday to do a small job. And we really appreciate these affiliates who, um, come on board from around the country. They do kind of the smaller jobs for us in these different areas.
[02:38] Speaker 2: We go around the country personally from Washington to do house cleanouts and some of the bigger jobs. And it's a, it's a blast to do that. We fly cheap on Frontier Airlines because we have the Go Wild Pass. I can fly anywhere in the United States for about $30, assuming that their Go Wild flight seats are available on whatever flight I want to take. They are available probably 90% of the time. I've done this for three years. It's a great thing if you wanna check it out. They've got a special deal going right now for the summer where for $199 you can get about three or four months of travel. And you can see it on flyfrontier.com, and, um, it's a great deal. Uh, I pay about... Originally, I paid $600 to get a yearly pass. Then they allowed us to renew it about three-quarters of the way through the year for $299, so I've done it for s- for half price the last couple of years, and it's a great deal.
[03:37] Speaker 2: But because we can fly around the country for only 30 bucks, we don't charge people for travel. And because I get lots of points at the Wyndham hotel chain, I'm one of their Diamond members, I stay at hotels for free, usually La Quinta if I can find one in the area. So we can compete with any junk removal company around the country. All we have to do is rent a pickup truck or a stake body truck. We use Enterprise trucks around the country when we need to rent trucks, and, uh, it, it's a, it's a great thing. So anyway, we are able to do that, and hats off to All Out Junk Removal in West Palm Beach, who just joined us yesterday as our 63rd affiliate around the country. Um, one of the keys to doing a successful radio show, if I can be so bold as to say that this is a successful one, um, is to talk about stuff that you have a passion for. And right now, my passion is for something that happened about 15 minutes ago.
[04:41] Speaker 2: Um, we got a call about, uh, three hours ago from a realtor named Karen Rawlings, who is a fabulous realtor with eXp Realty in Olney, Maryland. That's O-L-N-E-Y. If you're in the Washington, D.C. metro area, you might wanna look Karen up and, and give her a call if you have any questions about real estate. She's a, she's a gem of a person and a gem of a realtor. Uh, she had a home that we cleaned out the shed a couple of weeks ago for the owner who had put the home up for sale, and all they needed was the shed cleaned out. So we did that, but we got a call this morning that the furniture that was put in the home to stage the home by the stager needed to be removed today. And it just turns out we had time to do that today, so we dashed down and did that for Karen the last couple of hours. We literally got there when the moving people who were moving the new young tenant into the property showed up. We got there at just the same time, and, um, it worked out beautifully.
[05:52] Speaker 2: As they're hauling stuff in, we're hauling stuff out. The problem is, where do you put the furniture? The stager had some kind of medical problem, apparently a fairly serious one come up, and they didn't get their stuff out of the house in time.So, Karen, being a proactive realtor, called us and said, "We gotta get this stuff out of the house so the new folks can move their stuff in, and they're moving it in, you know, today." So we dashed down, loaded up about a truckload of stuff, normally about a $750 job. Uh, Karen gets 20% off 'cause she's just a good person, and so it's about a $600 job, and we took it over to her real estate office in Olney, and she said, "Just put it in the back of the office in the parking lot." So, we did. And God hopes, you know, it doesn't rain, right? Um, but anyway, a couch and some other stuff there, and, and just a b- you know, stuff from th- that was hanging on the walls and furniture and a kitchen table, and stuff like that.
[06:53] Speaker 2: So, there's a bunch of stuff right now sitting in the parking lot. Thank heavens, we got it out in time. The new tenant was thrilled and, uh, as we were hauling it out, his moving company was hauling stuff in. I do have to tell you about something I saw today though that com- that was... In 20 years of doing this, I've never seen anything like this. One of the things we had to haul out was the full-sized bed, maybe even a queen-sized bed, that was upstairs, uh, in the master bedroom. It had quilts on it, and, uh, you know, a couple of pillows. So, as we go up, w- we verified, you know, that bed goes, right? And they said, "Yeah, that bed goes." My buddy starts pulling the sh- the sh- the, the, the bed, the bedding and the sheets off of the bed, and finds out that there's no mattress. It's all a bunch of fake... It's a fake bed. It's sitting on top of about a dozen, uh, medium to large-sized boxes like what you'd get at Home Depot.
[07:59] Speaker 2: And the boxes were standing on their ends, um, and then just covered with, covered with quilts and pillows, and it looked like a legitimate bed, but it wasn't. And so we just were able to go in, un- you know, take the quilts off, undo the boxes. They were not taped shut or anything, but literally, there was no bed frame. There were no mattresses. There were a bunch of, I'm just gonna call 'em large-sized Home Depot-type boxes folded together, about a dozen of 'em, put on their ends. It's the exact height of a bed, and then they just threw some quilts over it. And I went, "What a brilliant idea to produce a bed, you know? I've never seen that before." So, it was easy to take apart, 'cause, you know, the boxes are a piece of cake. You just uns- undo those and fold 'em up. They come out easily, and you take the bedsheets off and throw them in a bag, and wham-o, you've got it. So, anyway, that's the lead-in to the, to the first important story. We get the stuff over to Karen's office.
[09:04] Speaker 2: We're out there in the back unloading it in the very corner of her parking lot so it's out of the way, and yours truly is up in the truck bringing the stuff from the truck, because I kind of packed it in while my buddy, June, brought oops, most of the stuff out from the, from the house. I know where the stuff is and where I've laid it in the truck. Not everything in the truck goes, so I'm bringing it from the front of the truck to the back of the truck. June, my buddy, then takes it off the truck and puts it in the parking lot. Well, all is well except, what we're using is a 16-foot stake body truck. A stake body truck is a truck that has four sections, um, like a fence almost. Four sections going down each side of the truck, and two sections put on the back of the truck. These are just sitting in holes cut in the, in the truck frame, so you can just pop these out, you know, whenever you need to do that.
[10:04] Speaker 2: You need to get to one part of the truck, you can just pop these out, and they are connected together, kind of linked together, um, so that, so that they're not loosely sitting in the truck. Well, to unload the truck, when you start, you take off th- the two in the back because you're gonna unload stuff off the back. Sometimes, we'll take those, and we'll set 'em down on the ground. I've learned that that's a really good idea. That's what June did with one of 'em. The other one, I was already up in the truck. I just pulled it up, pulled it out of the frame, and set it in the truck on the back corner right next to the other one that is per- kind of, at least permanently sitting and, and, and attached on the outside of the frame. So, we've got two sections of four-foot fencing, if you will, framing from this truck, standing up next to each other in the very back corner of the truck. That's critical to understand. Then, we take a couch off the truck. We get it most of the way off.
[11:08] Speaker 2: I now need to get down off the back of the truck to help with the couch. So, on the side of the truck, in the very back is a metal step that's about two feet off the ground and about halfway up to what I think is a four or four and a half foot high bed of the truck. I'm standing up on the bed of the truck. I kind of turn around a little bit to, to, to, uh, kind of lower myself over the side so my left foot can go in on the metal step on the s- very back side of the truck, in the corner of the truck. Does that make sense? So, all is fine, except yours truly forgets that the inside section of the truck in the back is not attached to anything. It's loose. So, I take two hands. Without thinking, I grab the top back part of that, and then I step off the truck. Well-Next thing I know, I'm on the ground. Um, thank heavens, I didn't bust a hip or a leg, or break an ankle or elbow. I can't tell you for sure what happened in sequence there 'cause it happened so quick.
[12:26] Speaker 2: All I know is, I'm suddenly on my back, I have fallen four or five feet. I, I scraped my right elbow, I must have landed on my right elbow and took about a half-dollar-sized scrape out of that elbow, so I got a little bit of blood there. My head did not hit the ground, thank heavens. My hat came off. I did not do any damage to my hips or my legs. When I stood up, I put my weight on my right foot and it was very tender, the right ankle. I've ne- I've played a lot of sports in my life, but I've never twisted an ankle, I've never had an ankle sprain, I've never broken an ankle. Um, I think what I did was sprain the ankle, and I can't tell you for sure how I did it. I wish I had a video. I think what happened is when I grabbed onto the, uh, the, the loose panel in the truck, which immediately gave way and gave me no support, I think what happened is that my weight was on my right foot on the very back corner of the truck.
[13:33] Speaker 2: My left foot had gone off over the edge of the truck on purpose, and at that point, my body just falls back and my right foot is still jammed kind of up on the top of the, of the ledge there. I don't know for sure if that's what happened. Uh, it just happens too quick, so you don't really know. All you know is, you're suddenly on the ground, and if your head would have hit the asphalt, you could have been knocked out, you could have been killed, you could have broken a hip, you could have broken a leg, an elbow. I mean, I have a sister who fell off a garbage can twice when she was, like, 10, and broke an arm both times, right? I mean, I'm falling off, you know, two or three times higher, uh, than a garbage can, and I'm 67, and I come down, and I am just lucky as can be that I'm, you know, moving on with work right now, doing a radio show, whatever. I could be on my way to the hospital in an ambulance.
[14:37] Speaker 2: Anyway, I've learned my lesson not to put those gates loosely in the back of the truck, because I'm gonna forget that it's loose and I'm gonna try to get down off the truck again, and yours truly is gonna do the same thing I did to myself about 20 minutes ago: fall on my butt. But I gotta tell you, thank God that I'm, that I'm not on my way to a hospital. Uh, I'm doing a radio show, and I'm back in the truck, and I'm driving around, you know, using my right ankle and foot to put the gas pedal down and hit the brakes and whatever. And I'm not in, in pain. It's, it's a little bit uncomfortable, but it's not hurting. I can move it around. I think I just probably gave it a good strain. And boy, was I mad when I hit the ground, though. You know, I've fallen many, many times, and I probably should have been injured a lot more than I've been. I've never broken a- anything.
[15:36] Speaker 2: Um, all the times I've fallen off the truck in the back when I'm at the dump or at somebody's house or, you know, you're getting in and out of a truck a lot, sometimes you're gonna fall, and regardless of how careful you are... But I, this is not the first time that I have put the loose gate in the very back corner on the inside of the truck and then unintentionally grabbed it to try to support me and give you something to hold onto while you lower yourself over the edge of the truck. I'm here to tell you, that sucker won't support you unless it's wedged down in the truck and connected to the, the, the, the piece next to it, which this one is not. It's just sitting there loose. It's like grabbing a broom handle and trying to expect it to holds, give you some support while you lower yourself over the side of a truck. It's not gonna work. But all, it all ended well. The, the client was very happy. The realtor is very happy.
[16:39] Speaker 2: Uh, we got the job done pronto, within about, we started it about two hours after we got the phone call to do it, and with the exception of a somewhat bloody right elbow and a right ankle that's just kind of a little bit strained right now, um, we move on to, you know, do the radio show and do whatever comes next. So anyway, that's, that's my life in the last half hour. Um, I don't recommend it, by the way. I th- if you're gonna lower yourself off of the back of a truck, and the i- the irony is, we have a hydraulic lift on the back of the truck, but we didn't use it at this point. We could have, and when you do that, you just, you know, push the button and it slowly lowers you down, and it's, you know, safe. We didn't do that this time, and I tried to lower myself over the edge of the truck, and I fell off the cliff.
[17:35] Speaker 2: I, I, I, you know, and it's funny, when, when you're the guy falling, it's kind of funny how fast it happens and how you can't tell somebody afterwards exactly what happened. All you can do is just feel yourself and go, "Oh, let's see. My elbow hurts. And oh, there's a little bit of blood there." And when you stand up and you put your weight on your right leg, you go, "Oh, crap. I can't, you know, I can't quite put all my weight on that leg." That's what it was like at, at first. It might get worse tonight. I don't know. I have a date at 7:00 tonight down at Ford's Theater.... that I'm very excited about. So, um, we'll see how, how (laughs) how, hopefully, hopefully I'll be all right (laughs) and I can walk around. I won't know for another, I don't know, 30 minutes or something. We'll see. I may even just get out and walk around in the shade while I do the show and see how my, how my foot feels. That might be a good idea.
[18:32] Speaker 2: But I'm here parked, um, not far from the, uh, the rental truck place, because I need to go just renew the contract for another month for the rental truck. And I'm parked in a Wendy's parking lot, and I'm telling you, I'm going to get a chocolate Frosty before this day is over. So we're going to take a break here for about a minute. Uh, you're listening to the Junk Refund Show on the BBS Radio Network. I'm your host, Alan Cook. With the exception of a bruised right elbow and a tender right ankle, I am feeling great. We'll be back in just a minute for more of the Junk Refund Show. All right. The commercial's back. We're just (audio skips) . Me too. I know. I, I don't know how ... Uh, you know, I'm going to take a tape measure and see if this sucker's five feet off the ground. I don't know how far it is, four to five feet, something like that. I literally bailed right off the back, backwards off a truck onto asphalt- Oh, wow. ... 30 minutes ago. I know.
[19:31] Speaker 2: You would think you would hit your head and be unconscious or something, right? Right. And, and, and the ... I'm lucky the gate piece didn't fall off. I think it fell off with me, but I'm lucky it didn't land on top of me and cut me to smithereens, you know? Oh . Yeah, yeah. So anyway, that's, that's what's happened in the last half hour (laughs) . (laughs) I know, I know, it's crazy. But I'm still on schedule to do everything I need to do today. (laughs) Right, so. You're at least doing something. Doing something. I'm doing something. Yeah. I'm doing something right. Yeah. Cool. We're back. Three- Hey, welcome back to the Junk Refund Show. I'm your host, Alan Cook. If you listened to the first segment of this show, you'll know that I'm kind of limping around a little bit from a fall that I literally just took about 30 minutes ago. I fell off the back of the truck and I have nobody to blame but myself, and, uh, but I'm okay. Uh, nothing's broken. I'm not on my way to the hospital.
[20:33] Speaker 2: I'm sitting here in a Wendy's parking lot salivating over a chocolate Frosty, which I'm going to get in about 40 minutes when I'm done with this show, and maybe ask them for a cup of ice to put on my right ankle, which is a little sore right now. I just fell about four to five feet off the back of a truck, literally fell, falling backwards. I didn't land on my feet, I don't think. I think I landed, but, uh, amazingly, my hip's not busted or something. I h- I landed on a right elbow and my right foot is a little sore on the, on the ankle area, and I literally can't tell you how I landed. I just know that my head snapped when I landed, but it didn't hit the ground, thank God, and my, uh, baseball cap came off. So there you go. Hey, but I've got some fun stuff to tell you. We always have really fun stories here. Um, one of them I'm going to tell you about happened on Monday, and this is, this is why, and I put this post on Facebook. Um, to...
[21:31] Speaker 2: And you can go look at Facebook at Alan Cook, and there's a J, initial J. A-L-A-N-J, period, Cook. Um, you can go check this out and see the post. It's worth doing that, by the way. Um, we have, uh, had an 80-year-old couple that lived in Potomac, Maryland in a very nice home for about 40 years, and they decided to move out to San Diego to live with their son, who is a former FBI, uh, guru. Let's just put it that way. And it was our job to clean out the house, so we did, and in the front room of this house was an 11 by 14 handwoven Persian rug that is beautiful. You know, the, kind of the maroon and the blue and the yellow and the white and a little bit of green and some reds, you know, that kind of stuff. It's just a beautiful rug. When we rolled it up, they, they decided not to take the rug with them to San Diego, and we're a company that doesn't just take the rug and go throw it in the dump and then go do the next job. That's what a lot of other companies do. Um, we don't do that.
[22:40] Speaker 2: So we took some photos of it. We put it up for sale on Facebook Marketplace for $1,000. There is a sticker on the rug that we noticed when we rolled it up that says $3,250. I believe that's the original price that these folks paid for the rug. You'll notice over years of wear and tear, that on one end of the rug, there are some of the tassels that stick out on the end that had worn off, about a foot to two-foot wide section had kind of worn down a little bit, so the tassels weren't really there. These folks never had any pets and they didn't smoke. There are no stains on the rug anywhere. We, we can tell when we roll it up if there's a stain. It's stain-free. It's just been worn for a while. So a $3,200 rug isn't going to sell for $3,200 when one end of it is kind of beaten up a little bit. So we listed it for 1,000 bucks. No takers.
[23:39] Speaker 2: We dropped the price to 500 bucks, got a lady in Charlestown, West Virginia, which is about an hour away from us, who really liked the rug, and offered us $350 because she was going to have to drive an hour each way to come and pick it up. I said, you know, once I checked and said, "Oh, you know, you guys are like 54 minutes away. If you just do the $500, we'll just deliver it for free." Well, she jumped on that and went ahead and bought the rug. She paid us $250 in advance and then the rest would get paid when we delivered the rug.So I said, "Okay, great." Well, we load this rug up. We had put it, by the way, in the meantime, in our storage unit, and re- basically rolled it out, and then we had set some furniture and some other stuff on it. So we classed up our storage unit by putting the rug down. We thought that was kind of cool.
[24:32] Speaker 2: Now we had to go in and pull all the furniture out so we could get to the rug again, roll it back up, put it in the truck, and drive it to Charles Town, West Virginia. But we did. So when we get to Charles Town, West Virginia to the address, we pull into this house that is literally like a George Washington-styled Mount Vernon kind of mansion. The pillars, the four pillars in the front of this home are the largest pillars that I've seen on a home. We're not talking a foot wide. We're talking maybe three feet wide. I mean, beautiful. It's a yellow home, massive home. Found out it's an 8,000 square foot home, and it sits on 100 acres of land. And the guy that owns it is a young guy, and when I say young, I'm saying probably in his 40s. His name's Lane, and he grew up in that area and had his eye on this home. It was in foreclosure for 14 years.
[25:31] Speaker 2: He told himself, "One of these days, I'm going to own that home." It's really, it's a modern-day Notebook, the movie Notebook-type story, where he finds this old home and he loves it and he wants to fix it up. And it was trashed when he got ahold of it, and now it looks like a million bucks. And I'm sure it's worth a lot more than a million bucks. When you walk in the home, fascinating stuff. You feel like you're back in George Washington's time. I asked him about the history of the home. He said it was built in 1820 by George Washington's nephew. This nephew is the kid who inherited Mount Vernon, the plantation estate of George Washington. And he and... The nephew and apparently his cousin, I think it was, married sisters. So they built two big homes in West Virginia, the one that Lane owns, and if you look, and it's on a little bit of a hill. And if you look across from there, through the trees, there's another big home, you know, couple thousand yards away or something.
[26:34] Speaker 2: There's another big home sitting on top of this other rise in the, in the beautiful West Virginia countryside, and that's where the, that's where the other cousin built another home for the other sister. And these two homes were the, w- were the summer homes of these guys who lived down in Virginia during the rest of the year, right? The other home, I... In fact, I told Lane as I'm standing there in front and I'm looking across through the trees at what's obviously another big home across the way, I said, "Well, tell me that Thomas Jefferson built that one over there." And he said, "No, this, this was, you know, uh, uh, George Washington's nephew and, and a cousin or something built that home." The second home, the other home, for many years, was the largest home in West Virginia. It is 13,000 square feet. The home that I delivered the carpet to, the rug to was 8,000 square feet. And it's just immaculate. Well, so we drop this, we drop this rug off. Lane is really happy.
[27:40] Speaker 2: He shows me the f- the family room that it's going to go in. There's lots of furniture in the family room. It looks really nice. And you almost feel like when you walk into this home, you feel like you're looking at a museum, and you want to go look at the paintings and you want to look at the, you know, teapots in the corner on the tables and stuff. And it's just immaculately kept. He and his wife live there with, with a daughter, just the three of them. And it sits on 100 acres of land. He said, "I'm trying to get another 90, you know, I'm trying to buy another 90." He says, "I farm this, plus I do, you know, a bunch of other stuff." He's just a fascinating guy, and he's from that area. So I was just intrigued by where we had now delivered this rug to. He was thrilled. He paid me the, the other 250, and we hopped in the truck and drove away. About... As we were pulling out of the long driveway, his wife pulls in in an SUV, and we just wave at each other and then pass each other.
[28:36] Speaker 2: And about 30 minutes later, I get a photo, which is on my Facebook page, and a text message, which is also on my Facebook page, from her. And her text message says, "I'm so happy !!! Tomorrow is my birthday and this rug is a gi- is my birthday present from Lane ! Thank you so much for delivering it. It's a perfect birthday present." Now, how's that for cool? And I took a picture of that message and posted it on Facebook because it is such a great message, and it's just a message that I love. So the other thing that's cool is that the 80-year-old folks out in San Diego now get 35% of the sale of the rug, which at a $500 price is about 175 bucks. They're thrilled, and they made money on the deal. The people who bought the rug are thrilled. They got a good deal. And bless Lane's heart, the photo that his wife included with her nice message shows the room with the rug already laid out on the floor and the furniture on top of it.
[29:51] Speaker 2: Lane just hopped right on it, cleared the room with the furniture. We di- he, we didn't help at all. He didn't ask us to help at all. We just dropped the rug off. Cleared it out, laid down the new rug, put the furniture back in, and whamo, it's all done and his wife is on cloud nine. Now, a lesson to you husbands out there and you boyfriends out there, if you want your girlfriend or your wife to be really happy with you...You need to focus on what she really wants for her birthday, or for Christmas, or for whatever. It's probably much different than what you would want. But if you pay attention to what she says, how she acts, what she talks about, et cetera, you too will get a clue on what you can give as a Lane-type gift. This was a brilliant move on his part. And to have your wife telling couple of junk removal guys who just delivered a rug to her that she is so happy, that's what life is all about. And Lane was smart enough to realize that's what she wants for her birthday.
[31:02] Speaker 2: Everybody wins in this scenario. And you can check the story out, and you can see the photos on my Facebook page, Alan Cook, Alan J. Cook. And, um, you'll see the whole story there, plus the note that she sent us. So that is one of our latest success stories on why we do what we do, and why we're so proud of it. Another thing that we had success with, and, and we, we just finished clearing out a home for a lady in Olney, Maryland, referred to us by Karen Rawlings, who went through a divorce after being married for many decades. It was a three-year battle type of divorce. It was not a friendly thing apparently. And, um, she now has to move out, or has decided to move out, uh, of a nice large home that is furnished very, very well. And most of that stuff, she can't take with her. She's downsizing now.
[32:01] Speaker 2: So in that roo- in that house, upstairs, there was a room with a couple of pink mattresses in it, it was a bedroom set, and i- it turns out that the cabinets, the dressers were made in Italy. They, they had kind of a Formica covering over them, but it, it made it look like it was marble. And it says "Made in Italy" on the back. And this lady had chosen not to buy any knobs for this set, so all of the drawers and two nightstands and a long horizontal dresser did not have any knobs on them. But it was also not used much at all, it was kind of a guest room. Uh, the two pink mattresses, I mean, in the state of Maryland, you can't sell a used mattress, so we couldn't include that. It was a part of the picture that we posted on Marketplace.
[32:51] Speaker 2: But we just put this bedroom set up for sale, and I think we put it up for sale for like 600 bucks because it doesn't have knobs and we ca- it doesn't include the mattresses, and we didn't really, we got a few people asking about it, but we, then we decided to just cut it in half and sell it for 300 bucks. And this wonderful lady named Yulia, um, eh, Latino lady, saw it and said, "Yeah, I want to do that." Well, we had hauled, eh, we had hauled it out of the room, we had put it in a storage facility on Gude Drive, where they give you the first month free for like 46 bucks, which is the insurance cost and I don't know what else costs, taxes and whatever. For 46 bucks, we rented for the first month a $280 unit that is a 10 by 20 unit and just filled it up with the furniture from this lady's house.
[33:47] Speaker 2: And the goal was to get that furniture sold in the next 30 days and then either keep the unit, because this is a good price for that size unit, or bag it and turn it, you know, turn it back in and it'll only cost me 40 bucks. Um, so anyway, we, we took it over there. Then this lady says, "Hey, I want that bedroom set." We loaded it up, we delivered it to her for free, and it worked out great. We took it down to her. She was very excited about it. Um, she knew that it needed to, she needed to get knobs for it. Um, it was just terrific. One mistake we made is that we forgot to take the bed frame when we took the rest of the furniture. We just forgot the bed frame. So the second day, we went back and took that back down. Um, the reason I'm telling you this story is that we have done, I'm gonna say somewhere around 150 transactions on Facebook Marketplace where people have left us ratings, and our score is 4.7 out of 5.0 for about a 150 ratings.
[34:46] Speaker 2: It might even be 170 ratings, I can't remember. But that is a 94% customer satisfaction rating on Facebook Marketplace. That's what you call really, really good. Especially for that many transactions. Um, what's interesting though is that when we got there, um, the la- they had not paid us anything, we del- we literally delivered the furniture, loaded it up and delivered it for f- for, for free. Actually, I say delivered for free. She asked us if there's a delivery charge. I said, "Yes," given the mileage, I, 30 minutes away or something. I said, "Yeah, 100 bucks, we'll deliver it," and so it's $400 total. Okay. So we go down and we deliver it and we're offloading it and it's putting it in. Then her boyfriend/husband, I'm not sure who it is, um, started saying, "Well, how about if we pay you 200 now and 200 when you bring the bed frame back?" And I'm kind of going, "We haven't done any dealings with you.
[35:43] Speaker 2: This has all been done with Yulia and she has been so good to work with and so straightforward," that it's that, it's that frustration of dealing with people who have a built-in bias that someone else can't be trusted. I tend to... And that's pre- very prevalent in society today, especially in the after-market place of, you know, selling used furniture. There's all kinds of stories that are out there about people who say one thing and do another. It's the same thing that happens in the dating world, where you go to dating sites and people say, "You know, I did this and I did this and I did this."... and here are my photos," and you find out that the photos are five to 10 years old. And you find out maybe they're not quite as tall as they said, or maybe they misstated their age so they could show up. They made it younger than, uh, what it really is so they could show up in searches and, you know, all kinds of things happen.
[36:37] Speaker 2: And you can make yourself pretty much look like whatever you want to look like these days, and that's unfortunate because in the business world, especially with these guys who are, you know, a, a generation or two unh- younger than me, they tend to assume that something bad is going to happen, and they make their decisions from that perspective. And I come from the generation that says, "I'll trust you until you give me a reason not to trust you," and I have the faith that good things are going to happen, whereas a lot of people honestly believe nothing but bad things are going to happen. That's a frustrating thing for me to deal with, because there I am, having loaded up the furniture, driven it 30 minutes, unloaded the furniture into their home, and just honestly forgot the bed frame. These folks have the furniture in their home. They didn't have to come pick it up. They have paid nothing for it up to this point. I have done all the work. I have spent the money on gas.
[37:44] Speaker 2: I have spent the money on my labor to help me, and I have nothing. They have the furniture, and then they want to negotiate, "Okay, we're only going to give you half now, because how do we know you're going to come back with the bed frame?" Really? Look, let's just step back and take score. You have the furniture. What do I have? I have nothing. How many times have we dealt with each other? Once. Did I show up? Yes. You have no legitimate reason to assume that I'm not going to come again. "Well, other people do," and I just interrupted. I said, "Look, I'm not other people. I don't care what other people do. I'm me, and I've told you one time that I would be here, and here I am. And if I tell you that I'm coming a second time, why in the world would you think that I wouldn't show up when I showed up the first time?" Does that make sense? I wish more people saw it that way. All right, anyway, it worked out great. Yulia is terrific.
[38:46] Speaker 2: She paid me 300 bucks, and then I came back the next day with the bed frame and she gave me the other 100. Worked out great. So everybody won. It was, it worked out just fine. It just kind of bugs me when people assume something bad's going to happen and that they can't trust you. It's too bad, but that's kind of the world we live in, in a lot of respects. All right, I'm going to take another break here, and, uh, we'll be back in about a minute for the last segment of the show. You're listening to Junk Refund Show on bbsradio.com. I'm your host, Alan Cook. We'll be back in about a minute. Thank you. I am going, um, just up the street a short ways to, to have the Enterprise folks just rewrite the contract for another month. They have to check in every month and, you know, make sure the truck's okay, and they rewrite the contract, so I'm going to go do that. Um, I'm going to talk about what I had to do to get to the point to be able to do that today, which is a real success story.
[39:52] Speaker 2: Um, then I dash home. I'm supposed to pick up a pickup truck that I had the starter replaced, and I've got to be down at Ford's Theater in downtown DC at 6:30 for a date to go see the musical 1776 at Ford's Theater. Yeah. I know. I know. And I think my ankle's going to be okay, but I don't know for sure. Wow. So we'll see. Thank you. So that's my... It's like run, run, run, and when I get home tonight, I'm just going to collapse in bed and thank, thank God I made it, you know? Uh-huh. Yep. Hey, welcome back to the Junk Refund Show. This is Alan Cook, your host, coming to you from Rockville, Maryland in a Wendy's parking lot where I'm going to walk in and grab a chocolate Frosty here shortly to reward myself for not having died when I fell off the back of our truck about 45 minutes ago, just before I did this show. And the only damage I did was I scraped my right elbow and brought a little blood out. I literally fell off the back of a truck.
[41:07] Speaker 2: I probably fell four to five vertical feet backwards off of the truck onto asphalt, and I'm here to tell you, nothing broke except I feel like I've twisted my ankle, and I can't tell you exactly for sure how that happened. I wish I had a video of it, but it's, uh, that's the worst that's happened. That's what's happened in the last little while. But I do have a great story to tell you about what happened this morning, and you will never guess where it happened, those three immortal letters, MVA, right? The Motor Vehicle Association. My birthday is next week on May 7th. You can start sending packages anytime, by the way, gift cards, you know, whatever, Venmo, I don't care. My birthday is next week on May 7th, and, um, I needed to renew my driver's license. Now, I think the one I have right now, I've had for 10 years, and I think that's the case. I think that's what they gave me 10 years ago. And so when I was 57, I guess, I re- I re- you know, got my last license.
[42:19] Speaker 2: Now I'm 67, and so you're kind of going, "All right, um, what do I need? What do I need to do?" I have moved since my last...... driver's license. So I have to change the address. So I went in on the web to change the address and the computer would not accept the new address. I had to get a letter from a property manager verifying that this was indeed my new address. Well, I called to get that yesterday. They prepared it. I picked it up th- uh, this morning. So that's, that's good. Then I also called the MVA number and said, "Okay. What do I need to take with me to go renew my driver's license?" They said, "You need a copy of your birth certificate." Well, I was born in Utah, and I just can't go get suddenly a copy of my birth certificate. I have family out there, and this was yesterday afternoon, I'm talking to them on the phone.
[43:17] Speaker 2: There's no way I can have a family member run over there, get a copy of my birth certificate and FedEx it to me so that I get it before my 8:45 AM appointment. So that was doubtful. They also said, "You need a copy of your Social Security card." I don't have my Social Security card with me. I can't even tell you where it is or where it was. And I s- so I called the Social Security Administration and they said, "Oh, yeah. You can go online and take care of that online." So I did. Like late last night, I'm online thinking, "Well, this is no problem. I can just get it." Wrong. When you go in there and try to give them all the information for what you need, they can do it and send you a new card, but you don't get it for like 10 days. And if you want to go get it personally, you can go set up an appointment, and those appointments are booked out 45 days.
[44:08] Speaker 2: I know because I tried three or four different Social Security Administration offices closest to me, and the earliest I could get into one of them was June 10th. Well, that doesn't work. So, they, the la- the lady said, "If you don't have your birth certificate, and if you don't have your Social Security card, you can go in there with a bank statement showing your new address and... But I need, we need the most current bank statements from, like, a credit card company and from your bank where you do your banking." Well, I do online banking. So I'm on the web early this morning looking at the bank, seeing how I could print out one of my statements. Well, so far, yours truly hasn't figured out how to do that. But I did get an offer to buy whole life insurance from the same bank, and that envelope was sitting there and I went, "Well, I'll take that with me.
[45:00] Speaker 2: Maybe that will suffice, because it has the right address on it." I did have a copy of my, I did get my latest statement from Discover card, so there you go, that worked, and I grabbed my passport. They said, "Yeah, passport's a good ID to have. That's good." So I took my passport, I took a whole life offer from my bank, and I took a Discover card statement in. No birth certificate, no Social Security Administration card. I know I'm going to have an eye, an eye test. I've always had pretty good eyesight, but, you know, it's been 10 years. You never know, maybe I'm going to need to get glasses or contacts before they'll renew my license. And I like to fly a lot. You need that, you know, current license that's, what, ID certified or whatever it is these days that makes it extra safe. So I'm kind of going in this morning at 8:45. Made the appointment online, which was slick and easy, and I go in this morning going, "Dear Lord, help me get out of here before noon." You know?
[45:57] Speaker 2: Um, and I'm also thinking, "Well, what if I have, you know, a fine or an EasyPass toll that hasn't been paid or who knows what you might have, right? What if I have something like that? Does that prevent me from renewing my license?" It can prevent you from registering a vehicle. I know that. Can it prevent me from getting a new license? I don't know. Now, most people are smart enough, when you're going to go in and try to get a new license, you're going to look decent, so that picture is going to be used all over the place for 10 years when you show your license. I am not one of those people. I'm a junk removal guy. I get up in the morning, put on a baseball cap, and I walk out, right? Well, the appointment was all set. I take this different stuff with me. I'm kind of assuming hopefully there's enough here that shows the new address, gives them proof that I am who I say I am. I've got my passport with me. I go in.
[46:57] Speaker 2: I only am waiting in the MVA for literally three minutes after I check in, and they call me over to, you know, booth number eight where they're going to help me. This nice young lady was there to help me, and in li- I'm going to say in maybe 11 minutes, maybe 12 minutes, maybe 9 minutes, I was done. They didn't ask me for my passport. They didn't ask me for a bank statement. I actually just answered a few questions on a screen, and then there was that moment of mild tension where she says, "Okay. Put your eyes, put your face over here and just look into this, you know, thing," 'cause they're going to do the eye test. And so I did that, and I looked at the eye test. There's four levels of letters that they want you to read. They get increasingly smaller as you go from top to bottom, and she says, "Read the fourth row. There's four on the left side, there's four on the right side." And I went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Got them all right.
[47:59] Speaker 2: She goes, "Okay." Um, "And then the lights flash on the right side for ch- peripheral vision check." You know, she says, "Can you see the flashing lights on both sides?" "Yes, I could." "Okay, what do you see now?" I said, "It's flashing on the right side only." "Okay, what do you see now?" "It's flashing on the left side only." "Okay." Well, I passed the eye exam. Thank heavens. That was great. So that was easy. I answered a few more questions, you know, "What is your political party? Are you a registered voter?" Blah, blah, blah, some other stuff. I did all of that, and then it, and then it says, it-We can issue your new driver's license. Um, how fast do you want to receive it? Would you like to pay $18.57 for expedited shipping?
[48:45] Speaker 2: And I went, "Yes, I do." And at that point, the lady looks at me and she s- and a couple of times during the process, she has to call a manager over to get some kind of override or approval, and I'm going, "Man, I hope they accept the letter that verifies where I live, and I hope they, you know, will let me do this without my birth certificate and without my Social Security number," and blah, blah, blah. "I hope this all works." Well, manager number one came over and, you know, touched the computer a few times, and boom, everything was good. Manager number two came over, touched the computer a few times, everything was good. I just sat there, kind of with my fingers crossed, hoping that I wasn't gonna be there for 45 minutes, you know, or two days, or whatever it's gonna be. Well, like I said, in about 11 or 12 minutes, my guess, 10 minutes maybe, um, I was all done.
[49:40] Speaker 2: A- and they said, "Okay, that'll be $87, including the 18 bucks to expedite it." And it turns out that I'm gonna have my new license. They took a photo of me. I took my baseball cap off and tried to make my hair look good, but I'm sure I wasn't successful. They took a photo of me. I didn't care really what I looked like. I just, you know, go ahead, shoot it, that's fine. I just wanna get this sucker, that's all I'm after. So, they take a photo of me. I put the baseball cap back on. Few minutes later, everything is done and she says, "Okay, you'll have it between one to two business days from now, and we're gonna send it to you, like, by certified delivery.
[50:21] Speaker 2: Someone's gonna have to sign for it." I said, "Does it have to be me?" "No, just someone has to sign for it." I went, "Okay." I called the front desk of the place where I'm at now and said, "Hey, can you..." I, I just alerted them to the fact that my new driver's license is gonna come in the next day or two, I just need somebody to sign for it. They said, "No problem. We'll do it." I walked out of there the happiest guy in Montgomery County, Maryland. I couldn't believe, and I would've bet money that it would not have gone so smoothly. I, I am, you know, I have various vehicles. I get them sometimes from junk removal jobs. Uh, sometimes I register them as historic vehicles. Sometimes I register them and drive them around as just regular vehicles, you know, it just depends. But in this case, by golly, I was in and out of there in 10 minutes. I renewed my driver's license. I didn't have to take a test. I just had to do the visual stuff.
[51:22] Speaker 2: Um, my eyesight is still good, I don't need glasses. I mean, it was a dream. It was a dream come true, and that's how I started my day. And I was so excited that I'm gonna have my new driver's license, and it's good til 2036. I think that's another 10 years, which, you know, keeps me on the road for a while. So, anyway, very excited about that. That worked out. And what they said was, um, "We can't, you won't have your new license for one to two business days, but we're gonna give you this printout right here, which is good for 30 days. This is your new license. Keep it with you. Anybody has any questions, this is your information." I went, "Hallelujah. That works for me." So, I was thrilled with that. It all worked out well, and that was the beginning of my day, and it's just been cruising ever since, until I fell off the back of a truck about an hour ago. But I'm still alive, so that's good too.
[52:22] Speaker 2: So, anyway, there's, there's the kind of day that I'm having in the junk removal business. I do want to tell you about something. If you're in the Washington, DC area, I mentioned that my birthday is next week. I will be 68, and for three or four years now, I do a special deal on my birthday, good only in the Washington, DC area. And I'll be announcing it tonight and tomorrow on the web and other places. You're able to buy a pickup truck of junk removal, normally $229, for $68, my birthday age. And we're gonna make 68 of them available, first come, first served. If we sell all 68 of them, which we probably will, that will bring in about 4,600 bucks on this special deal. And that's kind of got me pumped up to see how much we can bring in in the next, you know, couple of days doing this deal. They will be good through December 31st of this year. You pay for it in advance, like you're doing a Groupon, and I keep track on a spreadsheet of who buys how many, and then off we go.
[53:29] Speaker 2: And, uh, there you have it. So, that's kind of my next little promotion that I'm doing. Um, I did have, I do want to close with one other thought here. We've got, like, five minutes left, and it looks like maybe only a couple minutes left. Um, a couple of thoughts here. Uh, I did an estimate yesterday afternoon. Let's see, it's west wind. I did an estimate Tuesday afternoon to clean out a home for some people. Um, again, referred to us by, this is Maggie Rawlings, Karen's daughter in Olney, Maryland, with EXP Realty. And I met the lady from Baltimore, who came down to her dad's house, that we're cleaning out in a retirement community, where you had to be 55 or older. So, we're gonna clean out that house. I gave her an estimate. She gets a discount, 'cause Karen's family referred her. Came out to about 3,000 bucks. Well, she goes home, talks to her brother, calls me or texts me late last night, and goes, "We're in. Let's do this.
[54:27] Speaker 2: How soon can you start?" And I said, "I could technically start today, on Wednesday." She goes, "Fine, I'll meet you at 10 o'clock." Well, at 10 o'clock, I get a check for $3,000 yesterday.Now, that's what you call not a bad day at work, right? For most of us. So I get the check, but then... And then we spend two hours starting to clean out this house. Then I have to take off to go to Upper Marlboro, Maryland, about 45 minutes away, to our church storehouse, where we store food for people in our congregation who have fallen on hard times and need some help with groceries. Our bishops can fill out what we call a food order and a guy like me goes down, we go to this, this facility that's owned by us and it's got all the basic stuff that you could live off of, you know, from peanut butter to raspberry jam, um, fresh fruits and whatever. It's all right there. It's like a miniature grocery store. We have a bunch of these around the US. We filled out, uh, we, we...
[55:26] Speaker 2: Me and a, my, one of my worker buddies came with me, we went down and we let... Each filled up a grocery cart full of food for two guys in our congregation who have fallen on some hard times. What stunned me was how much food they were getting. It is not my say, it is the bishop's decision and the individual's decision on how much they get. I just go down and pick it up. I was kind of stunned that we were getting so much food for each one of these guys. Now, the irony of it is, here I am getting a grocery cart full of food for somebody in need, and I'm the guy, and I'm the guy who, in the back of my pocket in my wallet right then is sitting on a $3,000 check. Why in the world would I be concerned about how much food somebody else is getting when I just got, what, 30 times that amount of goods and services in terms of dollars?
[56:26] Speaker 2: I, I commented while I was down there, I thought, "Man, this is a lot of food." And we went out and we loaded it in our truck, two big grocery carts full of food. I was... I couldn't put it in the front of the truck, we didn't have room. I put it in the back of the truck and then it started to rain. Then I drive 20 minutes back into DC to do delivery number one and 20 more minutes to do delivery number two, and the bottom line is... And I'm still kind of shocked over why we're giving so much food to people, right? Having completely forgotten that I just got a $3,000 check a few hours earlier. So the bottom line is, I got a text message from recipient number one and then a lengthy text message from recipient number two. The first message said, "Thank you so much for delivering the food. God bless." The second one was much longer and went on to, to compliment everybody that was involved, me for doing the delivery, et cetera.
[57:24] Speaker 2: And the reason I volunteered to do this delivery is because in our church, we're all kind of assigned to look after somebody else, and one of these guys is one of the people I'm assigned to kind of make sure he's okay. So I thought, "You know what? I should be the guy that does this." The bottom line is, instead of worrying about what's happening to somebody else, just look at your own life, count your blessings and be grateful, okay? Simple. And don't worry about what's going on with somebody else. Just step in to help out where you can and be grateful for what you have, and everybody wins. And when I looked at those two text messages, I went, "Who in the world cares how much food they got? They probably appreciate this food more than I appreciate the $3,000," right? That's the lesson I learned yesterday. Anyway, I'll pass that along to you, because this show is not only about how to get the junk out of your front room, but also how to get it out of your life.
[58:19] Speaker 2: So there's a way to do it. Join us next week on The Junk Refund Show. Check out past episodes on The Junk Refund Show podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to Thomas, who, uh, helps... Thomas Newsome, who is Don's son, who helped out today as our producer. He always does a great job. And we'll see you next week on The Junk Refund Show, three o'clock Eastern on bbsradio.com. Have a great week, everybody.
[58:52] Speaker 1: (gentle music) Thank you for listening to The Junk Refund Show, the longest running junk removal radio show on the air. Join us next week as we discuss innovative ways to declutter your home, your business, and your life using 20 years of junk removal experience. Find out why we give out free ice cream gift cards to our clients, too. In upcoming shows, we will explore how to get the junk out of your relationships, your spiritual life, your waistline, even your travel life. Plus, call in with questions and situations you would like some help with. At 1-800-JUNK REFUND, we are committed to bringing the next generation of junk removal, because not all junk is junk. See you next week on The Junk Refund Show, every Thursday afternoons at 3:00 PM Eastern Time right here on BBS Radio TV.
[01:00:00] Speaker 1: (gentle music)
