WORKING -- Bart Patel

Story by Alex Coolman; photo by Greg Fry

HE IS

A student of storage

LIFE, ORGANIZED

Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is playing in the distance as Bart Patel

walks down a hall of white galvanized steel.

“It’s KIIS-FM,” explains Patel, manager of the Instorage facility in

Costa Mesa. The radio is supposed to keep patrons of the storage space

calm and content while they attend to their belongings -- to prevent them

from freaking out in the weird loneliness of the austere, echoing space.

It would be easy, in pure silence, to be intimidated. The concrete

floors, caged florescent lights and ceiling laced with sprinkler lines

convey nothing but efficiency, cleanliness, and order.

There is life here, too, Patel says. But it’s organized into little

cells.

It’s much more cost-effective that way.

MINIMUM HASSLE

Patel hasn’t always been in the storage business, and he isn’t as high

in the ranks as he would like to be. The 45-year-old Lake Forest resident

was once in the dry-cleaning business.

Though he’s just the manager of Costa Mesa Instorage and not the

owner, he hopes to one day have his own storage business.

“It’s minimum hassle with maximum returns,” he said. “If you look at

this area [of Orange County], people don’t have much room. The occupancy

rate is very high.”

As he walks the halls, Patel takes mental notes on what makes a

storage space effective: elaborate security systems, sanitation bordering

on the antiseptic, and the occasional round of insecticide and rat traps.

“If you do that constantly, you’ll never have an infestation problem,”

he said.

LIFE, DISORGANIZED

Insects or rodents aren’t all that can disturb the order of a storage

business. Sometimes the people who use the facility are chaotic enough to

create a few problems of their own.

There are customers who fall behind in their rent payments. And there

are customers who seem to think their units are something like

high-security Dumpsters.

“They might throw everything in there, and that’s it,” Patel said.

“They abandon it.”

But for the most part, customers seem to do a fairly good job of

cramming their lives into a box. People bring in business records, tools,

household items -- all the chaos of everyday existence -- and sometimes

they manage to cram it into a space that’s as small as 5-by-5 feet.

The ceilings, Patel noted, are high.

“You can stack up quite a bit.”