A guest installment by Self-Storage Talk Community Manager Tony Jones

Lets face it, the holidays can be stressful. Not only is there inconvenient travel, family tension and dealing with grumpy members of the public, the end of the year often comes hurling at many self-storage managers like an oncoming freight train. Whether youre struggling to reach year-end numbers or feeling the onslaught of holiday psychoses, your colleagues at Self-Storage Talk, the industrys largest online community, are a tremendous resource to help you exhale and regain your business focus.

This good-natured camaraderie is particularly evident this holiday season. Whatever the reason, many SST members have been using the forum to release some stress, get creative with threads and display their sense of humor.

The forum is filled with more than 6,500 threads and 59,000 posts, many of which are serious in nature. Self-storage managers can glean and share advice from colleagues on everything from marketing tips and technical know-how to handling unruly customers. But its also a place where industry professionals come to socialize and occasionally blow off some steam at the end of a tough day.

Case in point is an ongoing, playful discussion called Game Time! in the General Storage Chat section designed to get members to reveal little tidbits about themselves. Started by LockItUpOgden, the thread is a game in which members respond to a true/false/sometimes statement with a related detail about themselves, and then post a new statement for another member. The diversion has created an interesting and occasionally nonsensical string of responses, including details about cooking habits, travel, athletic talents and chopstick prowess.

The General Storage Chat forum is also home to a humorous discussion (How Many?!?) in which members are guessing how many people can fit inside a 10-by-30 storage unit. An industry take on the old college prank of stuffing people into a phone booth (remember those?), the question has prompted numerous replies, with some members applying mathematical reasoning to reach an answer. The thread even sparked a serious discussion about whether or not facilities could use the question to create a marketing promotion and contest for customers. Smartgirl, who started the thread, even indicated she would approach her district manager about the idea.

Even during their silliest moments, SST members have a way of applying their creativity to real-world self-storage ideas and facility issues. If youre not yet a member, you are missing out on the ability to interact with more than 5,700 colleagues, many of whom willingly share their tremendous knowledge and experience, and many more who passionately come to the support of those in a jam. More than business networking and interaction, SST is also an industry support system. Activate your free membership today at www.selfstoragetalk.com.