Exactly. Egg-zack-leeee.
That’s a good point about the moves getting bigger and badder as we get older and feebler, too, MandaJO. Heck, I used to move by packing my car - two loads and I was done. Those days are long, long gone.
Probably they shouldn’t have said it with their mouths full.
Daniel
Agreed on every point.But it’s important to remember something when the quoted section applies.
If you have stuff that is too valuable to entrust to a buddy with a few beers in him, you have the money to afford to hire movers. Good point Dinsdale.
There is, however, a special circle of Hell reserved for those who enlist you, with the standard guy contract - nay, the explicit promise - of beers afterwards, to give up a Sunday trucking furniture across town and then busting one’s hump carrying heavy bits of it up a 300 yard unpaved driveway resembling a sort of vertical Somme so steep that even the trucks can’t get up it, a driveway that would have made Sisyphus himself say, “Ah, fuck it.”…only to find oneself rewarded with two - count 'em, two bottles of low-alcohol ferret’s piss.
OK, I suppose in a court of law that would qualify as beer, even beers, so that the recompense could be considered as technically adequate, but damn if it doesn’t break every rule of male bushido extant. It isn’t even the alcohol; it’s the whole guy principle: I carry your sofa, you pour beer down my throat. Never again with that shit: pay some movers next time, and I hope they kick your Czech crystal all the way to the top laughing.
One time in college I moved a couple of blocks from an apartment to a house by hand and on foot! God knows how many trips that took over the course of a couple of days. Them Cerwin Vegas were heavy, man, but did they kick out the bass!
Yeah, with you on the “long gone!”
Having said all this, the OP’s “friends” are anything but. They should have had the decency to make up some excuse before hand. Once you commit, your friend is counting on you. If a friend is close enough to move, then they had better be close enough for you to keep your word.
I’m a new convert to the “pay movers, and quit asking your friends” camp. We moved about three months ago, and at first, I said to my husband, “Oh, I’ll pack, and you can get your buddy Don to help move the big stuff.”
Yeah, right. I was 7 months pregnant, with two small children to chase after, and neither my husband nor his buddy had any desire to haul several tons of furniture down a precarious stairway and into my pristine new house. Neither is all that young, and they do fairly heavy work all week.
So we paid $1200 for four guys to come pack up all our crap and move it across town for us. Took them 7 hours, but it would have taken us 7 days, at the rate I was moving then. It was so worth it.
I hate moving. It doesn’t help that I used to move every year and that I did it from the age of 18 and going off to college to the age of 26. I then switched to moving every two years. Somewhere in those years, I got married and then I went from a minimalist lifestyle of everything can fit in a van to my current condition. With the last move, I said screw it and hired movers for the furniture. I packed and moved the boxes and clothing myself.
I have helped friends move for a few years but recently we all came to the conclusion that we are not doing this anymore. We are too old and too busy to spend a weekend hauling furniture.
I recently did a move myself and asked several friends to give me a hand. These were folks I had helped move previously, and they had no problems returning the favor. I, in return, realize the balance of power has shifted back to them again should they need help in the future.
I tried to be as considerate as possible. I spent 3 days packing and boxing everything and taking it in shifts to the new place. I had the truck waiting in the morning when they arrived, and all that was left was the big stuff. We completed the whole move in 4 hours because I’d done so much work on my own ahead of time.
I don’t see anything wrong in asking folks to give you a hand, as long as it is understood you will return the favor. The sauce of true friendship is making sacrifices of this type for one-another. If you don’t want to do that (or they don’t want to do that for you) then what you have are aquaintances, not friends.
Hi Hal,
You’ll have to make this a note to yourself.
"Have the dinner after the move. Not before the move. "
It does suck that your friends backed out but one of my friends worked as a mover for several years and he said they don’t mind the boxes as long as they are well taped and not too heavy, they are the easiest things to move and stow in the truck.
Jim
Like Skippy The Fabulous Flying Cowman, I had a really neat experience the last move I made. I moved from an apt to my new house and had people come and volunteer to help. The reason? Like one friend said, “Man, you’re always there helping other people, of course you’re going to get paid back,” Made me feel real good. 
I have some heavy shit, too. But, between 4 pick up trucks and a trailor I rented, we got everything out and in in about 2 hrs. One bedroom of my house already all my boxes of stuff from storage. I moved my clothes and a few other things myself the next day. Yeah, we’re all pretty big and strong guys. Most of my friends are in some sort of construction like me.
Being a lovely Fall day, I was able to plan on that afternoon/evening as a payment BBQ. We sat outside in lawn chairs and on the porch, and I cooked burgers and dawgs, and had beer, soda, and super chilled water. The guys and their wives were all actually having a good time. I still have the living room set up the way a couple of them suggested. I also threw a party a month later as a combo thank you / open house. Tho it was Winter by then, the house got so full and hot that people were spontaneously combusting. Quite a sight!
True friends are a treasure.
Which makes me wonder about the OP. I don’t want to come off as self righteous or anything, but how good of a friend are you to your friends in general? Maybe, like someone upthread suggested, they’re trying to tell you something? Or, they could’ve all caught raging asshole syndrome, I’m not in a position to judge. Sorry for your troubles, and enjoy your new digs, Hal.
I feel your pain, Hal. We helped every one of our friends move. Every freakin’ one of them.
When it was time for a reciprocal, (notices given months in advance) everyone backed out. Every fuckin’ one of them.
There were only a few that I didn’t hold a grudge against.
The rest…lest just say I still want to put a non-fading, non-removable bumper sticker on the back of their car that says, " My friends helped me move twice and I fucked them over."
Remind me not to piss you off. 
I guess the real question is, what do you do when they ask you next time? I’m thinking fits of hysterical laughter sounds about right.
Niii-iii-ce rant, loved the bit about Sisyphus.
I wound up owning my family house, so I’ve never had a big full scale move of my own. I’ve always owned a pick up and for years drove a truck that I could borrow on weekends. I have helped most of my buddies at one time or another.
To this day I tease them that I will call in all my favors by sitting on my front lawn with a beer and make them drag everything out, and back in again. 
We’ve always helped our friends move, no questions or gripes. They have always returned the favor without us asking. They just ask us when and where. Granted, we’ve only moved twice in the last 16 years, so it’s not like they’ve had to help a lot.
That being said, I always make sure they understand I’m not asking them to pack boxes. We do that, they’re just to there to help us move the packed stuff and furniture from one home to the other.
Our last move was relatively easy. We only had to move two blocks. Our friends showed up at various times, no questions asked and helped us move the big shit. We moved the boxes and little stuff on our own.
We have some friends who will probably be moving to a new house in the next couple of months. We’ll be there to help, as always.
By the way, we’re both in our lower 40s. I guess we’re just lucky with our friends.
I must be have an amazing circle of friends. We’re more of an extended family, really.
Just this past weekend, one of our members, a single lady in (I think) her mid-50s, needed help with her home. About a dozen of us invade her house and set to moving furniture into the garage, stripping out carpet and tackstrip, cleaning up the mess, all in preparation for her to be able to do some sort of mold abatement (Frankly, I didn’t see any mold, but she’s allergic to a lot more things than I am) before having Pergo installed from end to end throughout the house.
She’s having a flooring contractor do the Pergo, even though a couple of us have done Pergo and offered to install whatever she purchases. I’ve installed the stuff, and two of the guys there that day are general contractors and also quite able to install it while asking for no payment other than some burgers and cold water.
Oh, and while some of us are packing bookshelves into boxes to move to the garage and rolling up rugs, others are outside working on the deck. What was originaly expected to be “fix these two slightly rotten boards” turned into “rip out the whole dry-rotted, wet-rotted and teeming with live termites”
Spending a hot Saturday gutting a house and demolishing a deck to help a friend? Not too out of the ordinary for us.
Oh, there wasn’t a single bottle of beer to be seen. We do this willingly to keep our karma accounts filled - about half of the people there on Saturday were busting their humps two years ago to help us move.
Sounds like some people here need to re-evaluate their friends.
That really is an amazing circle of friends. I don’t think other people should be measuring their friends by the yardstick of your friends, though - you and your friends are way outside the bell curve.
We bought a house and moved in a few months back, and we did actually have enough help … mostly. I had to promise beer to get our friends over, and even then they all refused to help the second day - which left all the remaining heavy work to be done by myself and my father-in-law. They even did a crappy job to begin with - Guess what you idiots? You left our Goddam air conditioners lying around a corner in the back yard to get rained on!
Also, my friends are all in their mid-20s. Bastards.
I was with ya until the part about the No Beer.
Sorry - there’s another unwritten rule that help for moves only lasts one day. You ask your friends and family for help two days in a row, that’s starting to look an awful lot like something you should have hired professionals for (and something they should have been busy for.) They shouldn’t have left the AC in the yard, though.