By the fourth phone call, I'd cut the story to forty seconds. Hurricane coming to Pensacola. Bought a generator online from Northern Tool on Wednesday for store pickup. The store sold out before they could fill it. They canceled the order. They kept the money.
Eleven hundred and change, sitting in what I started calling nowhere land.
Thursday morning I drove to the store. The order was gone from their system. Canceled, they said. Your bank SHOULD release the funds.
I said the thing I would keep saying the rest of the morning. “Should” doesn’t get me a generator. The storm will be here tomorrow.
I called the bank regarding a pending charge they could see, but they couldn’t find any record of a return. They offered to initiate a dispute, which would provide a provisional credit within up to ten business days, while the investigation could take up to forty-five days. In the meantime, another store serviced a unit and held it for me until noon. Unfortunately, ten business days was not noon.
I hung up and told the empty room I was wasting my time. I used a stronger word than that.
Then Northern Tool corporate. They connected me to a district director who covers all of Florida except Pensacola. He was decent about it. He’d have the Pensacola guy call. A truck full of generators was stuck in Atlanta. Then the bank again, a different specialist, the same answer. Then a text from the regional manager. His team was swamped. Apologies.
At eleven thirty, I told a woman at USAA, who had been nothing but kind, that everyone had done everything they could do. “So I guess just brace.” She said they were praying for us.
Here’s what stuck with me. Nobody in that chain did anything wrong.
The store canceled my order because it had run out of inventory due to high demand. The bank couldn’t release the hold on my funds because the merchant never processed the return. However, the merchant couldn’t initiate a return for an order that it could no longer track. Each party had a valid reason for what they did. Everyone I spoke with was polite, and most seemed genuinely concerned. When you connect all these issues, you find a man without a generator and his money tied up, just one day before a storm’s landfall. Meanwhile, his daughters were staying at his house because school was canceled, and his home was supposed to be safe.
These systems are built for ordinary days. A ten-day dispute is a reasonable process on a Tuesday in March. Forty hours before a hurricane, it’s a closed door with a pleasant voice behind it.
I don’t say that with a sneer. I’ve spent most of my federal career inside processes like these. I know why they exist. Speed is how fraud gets in. Holds protect people. The rules are slow on purpose. They’re just slow on purpose for everyone, including the guy watching the cone of uncertainty sit on his zip code.
The military taught me a version of this before I had words for it. As a combat photographer, you check your gear before you get on the bird, not on the landing zone. If you didn’t pack it, you don’t have it. Effort on the ground doesn’t change the inventory.
Thursday morning was the loudest work I did all week, yet it felt the least productive. I spent hours on hold, telling the same forty-second story to five different people, and ultimately left a voicemail for a man responsible for every store except mine.
The work that kept the fridge cold and the fans running for my girls was completed long before this storm even had a name. I had batteries stored in the garage and a transfer switch wired to the fridge, the kitchen, and the living room. I made these mundane purchases on a day when nothing was expected to happen. On Friday night, the entire downstairs relied on those batteries.
By Thursday evening, a generator sat in the garage. It weighed about forty pounds. No matter how it got there, it wasn’t the eleven hundred dollars that was still floating somewhere between a store and a bank. That night, I told a guy at the bar that I could run power indefinitely. Water was the one thing I couldn’t plan for. I believed it would work out, and it mostly did.
Readiness is achieved through time, not money. When you need it, money is often too slow to be helpful.
On Saturday, I put Bean on the back of my bike, and we rode through the neighborhood. We saw trees on rooftops, a light pole snapped at its base, and shards of glass scattered across a street, with no explanation. The roof of the concessions stand at the ballfield had peeled off. One block had banded together for lunch, and a neighbor mentioned that they would figure out what to do today and handle the rest tomorrow. Downtown, the bars were open, cheerfully welcoming patrons, despite the park across the street being torn apart.
When we got home, the fridge in the garage was off. I’d unplugged it earlier to power the garage door so I could get the bikes out. Nobody’s process failed there. Just mine, for about an hour.
It’s Sunday night now. The power has been out since Friday. This afternoon, someone on our street said theirs had just come back. Fingers crossed.
The fridge in the garage is plugged back into the generator, and thankfully, I’ve had power since everyone lost theirs on Friday.
I still haven’t received the refund.