When you think about storage all that comes to mind is that it’s a place to keep your items that you can’t store at your home. Once you put your items in storage it’s out of sight out of mind. You make your payment every month and go on with the bigger things in your life. Even as an employee of a storage facility I don’t always think about how important storage can be, that is until my 4 year old starts asking questions.
My family and I live on-site at the facility I work at. My kids ask questions all the time like many curious children do. My 4 year old asked me why people leave their homes at our house, talking about the RV’s parked in our outside parking area. As he’s asking this question I can see the wheels turning and another question is about to follow. Before I can answer the first question he asks if the people live in there because he doesn’t see people going in or out of them. I then explain to him that the people don’t live in these “houses” right now, they have regular houses and they do not have the space to park them in their driveways. I explain to him that when people go camping or on vacation they take these mobile houses with them to live in instead of staying in hotels. For a 4 year old he is fascinated by this phenomenon and of course starts asking all the “why” questions.
One of my jobs in the mom department is to educate my children, so when they have questions I try my best to answer all of them, even the millions of why questions. One of the best feelings is when you answer the questions your children have and you too learn more about your job or life through your children. My 4 year old leads on with other questions about the units and why do people need to put their stuff in them. I explain to him that people need units to keep their stuff safe while moving from one house to another or just need extra space to store the items they don’t use everyday. I have a storage unit and so I took him to our unit to show him some of the items we keep in our unit. He was in awe when he saw the Christmas decorations and some of the keep sake stuff I had in their from when he was a baby.
In conclusion of this whole lesson he finally tells me that if we didn’t run a storage place then people wouldn’t be able to keep everything they needed and they wouldn’t be able to go on vacation. (His exact words!) I laughed to myself thinking about how the simplicity and complexity of his mind was working at the same time to understand that concept and I was one happy momma that he understood the basic reasoning for storage. It’s funny how as adults we go through life just accepting what we see or what we are told, we don’t question for further explanation or knowledge. The more questions my 4 year old asked the more appreciation I had for the small things in life such as storage and all the aspects of the storage business. It’s truly amazing how much we can learn from a 4 year old while teaching them at the same time.
Believe it or not, by my 4 year olds curiosity in my job I have learned to pay more attention in the storage world and become a better employee. I have also started looking at the reasons (big & small) of why storage is so important to everybody, which helps our facility have the best customer service in our area. So next time you feel annoyed by all the “why” questions from a child just remember you will always learn something new from their questions and their view of the situation and it will help you appreciate everything in life a little more.
