What to Watch Wednesday: Storage Wars

One of my goals for this year was to have a quiet night each week to limit my TV addiction. This has been going fairly well, but I must confess some days have been tough.

And I blame it on two new programs that if you do not have Tivod, you should do immediately.

The first is Storage Wars on A&E. This show fascinates me and baffles me simultaneously. And if Scott ever gets laid off again, I’m sending him out with some cash and a new career.

The premise is fairly simple: you don’t pay your storage bill, your crap gets auctioned off to the highest cash bidder.

There are four dudes and a chick highlighted in this show who basically make a living off said crap. There’s Darrell who’s all “I’m a gambler,” but then you find out he’s been doing this for like 30 years, has crap in his house worth more than the whole thing, and is a total softie. He’s helping to raise his grandchild and often saves items of particular worth for her inheritance. Hope she knows how lucky she is, I inherited some photographs and a few fans.

Darrell

The other vet is Dave. He’s the one you love to hate. He has a ton of cash from his thriving consignment store, an idea born of a DUI charge that forced him to volunteer at a Goodwill store. He sold off a huge collection his dad had and now has tons of cash. Mostly he sits in on auctions and drives up the prices for other bidders to make sure they blow their wad early and he can get the units he really wants.

Dave’s a douche.

Dave

Dave’s favorite target is young Jarrod, and by extension his wife Brandi. Jarrod runs a thrift store with wifey. Wifey has a good head on her shoulders, which is why she stays and runs the business, meaning she occasionally has to let Jarrod loose to auction on his own. These are typically disastrous events where he is baited by Dave into bidding twice what he promised Brandi for zero profit.

In addition to Dave’s general baiting, the other guys bait him with juvenile jokes of whether or not Jarrod’s balls reside in Brandi’s pocketbook.

Jarrod and Brandi

Answer: they totally do. But in his efforts to deny this fact, he throws away money they don’t have. It’s both amusing and sad.

I’m also pretty sure he has blackmail photos of his wife, because she’s approximately 100 times cuter and classier than he is. You just know when he’s not out losing their money, he’s at the store playing with the used Wii games that Brandi wants to sell to pay the rent.

Lastly there is Barry who is just an eccentric collector weirdo. I’m assuming he has family money, though he claims he gets it from being an antique collector. He’s new to the storage auction game and is constantly pissing people off with his less than serious approach to what other guys are using for their livelihood. These approaches include a midget on stilts with night vision goggles (guys, I’m good, but even I can’t make this up) and psychics who helped him find a cooler full of shrunken heads.

Barry

In addition to the personalities, what I find most addictive about this show is the STUFF!

One unit had a collection of newspapers from the day after Elvis died, valued in the hundreds of thousands. And he couldn’t afford his storage fee?

I mean, my crap was in storage for a year while I lived with Scott. I paid $30 a month. My unit would have been a vast disappointment for any of these guys, though perchance Jarrod’s thrift store people might enjoy my Macys couch and hand-me-down two-seater kitchen table.

If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in a storage unit, how do you not have the money to PAY the storage unit?

This is the only hole in the show, I want details on the owners. I want to know, did they die and nobody knew about this? Were they saving it for a rainy day and on the way to get the umbrella, they get hit by a bus? Because I just don’t understand.

Oooh, also I just finished watching an episode where they got to bid on Suge Knight’s stuff. Apparently he had hired movers to move his crap and then the movers never got paid and WHAM! His stuff is spread out in a parking lot in boxes for people to bid on.

With all the money in that man’s empire, nobody thought to pay the couple hundred bucks for the movers? Weren’t there enough worms in his life to try to profit from his crap?

So I realized this post went on and on, so I will save the second show that is driving me to distraction for another post.
But tell me, do you have random shows you get into? Have you seen Storage Wars? Do you also wonder what the back story is on some of these units? Do I need to seek professional help for avidly watching this?