The thread by Grapefruit about her recent move and her laggardness on packing reminded me of a time about 20 years ago, when some friends asked me to help them move. They were a young couple with a baby, that were moving from a one bedroom apartment to a small house they were renting. The husband said he was getting the u-haul and to show up at his apartment around 9:00 am on the coming Saturday. He, myself and another friend were all going to help.
I figured three grown men, a one bedroom apartment, load the truck, drive to the new place and unload it…we’d be done in three hours tops.
I arrive at 9:00 am ready to load boxes and furniture. Knock on the door and am greeted by my friend’s wife holding their baby. They are just finishing breakfast and their place looks like it did when I was there last month, fully unpacked and lived in. I’m a bit surprised and ask are they still moving today. She says sure, her hubby had gone to get the truck and should be back shortly. There are no boxes packed, no televisions unplugged from vhs players, no stereos unwired, no bed unmade, nothing. They thought we would start with the bigger pieces of furniture and they would pack up behind us. :rolleyes:
Well when the truck finally arrived and after about 30 minutes, the other friend and I had loaded their couch, tables and chairs, end tables, love seat, and easy chair. We stood there and watched the husband and wife throw dishes into liquor boxes.
I came close to leaving, but my friend said they had to be out of the apartment by 2:00 pm, and could I please stay and help pack.
We got them into their new house at 5:00 pm. They missed their 2:00 pm exit time.
From now on, when friends ask me to help them move. I ask them if they are going to be completely packed when I show up to start loading.
I once drove from northern NV to Santa Fe, NM with a friend to help her move back to NV.
[ul]
[li]She had packed nothing in boxes before coming to NV since she hadn’t originally been planning on moving, just visting.[/li][li]She had been working in a [crappy] pet store in NM, so the apartment was infested with fleas that she’d carried home from her job.[/li][li]We got pulled over on the way there…somewhere in the Utah desert The trooper that pulled us over casually mentioned that it sounded like the water pump was going bad…then he let us go on our merry way (after writing a ticket).[/li][li]The truck was borrowed from friends of her parents and sure enough, the water pump went out as soon as we got to Santa Fe.[/li][li]We had to stay 3 extra days waiting for the truck to get fixed. In a flea infested apartment. In summer. In New Mexico.[/li][/ul]
That’s really all I remember about the move. I seem to have blanked out the trip home. I probably made her drive while I slept. Or something.
When we moved into the house we’re living in now, I had gone to the nearby truck rental place (Ryder, I think) about a month ahead of time and reserved a good-sized truck so that we would only have to make a couple of trips to get everything from the old place to the new one (which was only about a mile or so away). Our moving date was the last weekend in May.
I showed up at the truck rental place the morning of our move and the guy tells me he doesn’t have any trucks. I felt like Jerry Seinfeld arguing with the car rental lady - why bother making a reservation if you’re not going to have a truck for me? That’s the whole point of a reservation! It hadn’t occurred to me that we were moving on the same weekend that every college student in town was moving out of their apartment. The guy told me the best he could do was rent me a smaller truck for four hours. I went ahead and rented it, and wasn’t too terribly worried about getting it back in time.
The worst part, though, was that the smaller truck didn’t have a ramp - and we had to move a piano.
The worst story that I ever heard happened to a friend of mine. He had been living with his girlfriend for a few years in a small cottage. They had just gotten married and had put down a deposit on a new, larger place. Everything was packed and ready to go including all of their wedding gifts still in their boxes. The plan was to get a truck and move it all the next day.
Later that same day or maybe it was early the next day the Painted Cave wildfire hit. Their cottage was right in the middle of the burn area. Practically everything that they owned, including all of the brand new wedding gifts was gone. All the survived was a kiln baked set of Japanese sake cups. They were sitting on the ground in the middle of what was their cottage like they had been placed their on purpose.
Given some of the moves I’ve been through, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal, actually.
My worst was when my ex-wife an I moved out of a shitty one-bedroom to her mother’s house. The move was my ex’s idea. I got all of my personal stuff packed and staged well in advance, but she didn’t lift a finger. Did I mention that she was working on developing a hoarding tendency? Not only would she not pack her stuff, she threw a fit if I touched anything, either. At one point, she decided to call the move off. I had already rented a truck and given notice to the landlord, so I refused. She tried to kill herself a couple of times.
My family helped with the move, and I’ve never been so ashamed or embarrassed in my life. Three years of cigarette smoke and crud covered everything, and my ex had locked herself in the bedroom for hours at a time, angrily refusing to speak to anybody, let alone thank them for helping.
Glad that’s over with. Looking back on it, I would have been better off just leaving her there.
Two stories, both extremes of “the weekend move” -
First where it got to 5pm Sunday night and the previous occupant still hadn’t shown up, let alone packed her gear and moved out. I had packed my stuff the previous day and was living out of a backpack. I ended up packing her stuff (with her permission)and stacking it outside of the room so I could at least have the chance of unpacking in time for a decent night’s sleep before work the next day.
The other was when I had the truck booked for Saturday lunchtime and the guy moving in had just split from his boyfriend, so he showed up with all his possessions at 7.30 in the morning and spent the next few hours hovering around making me feel like an intruder in what had been my own home for four years.
Wow, never had to deal with fires or attempted suicides.
I flat-out have never asked a friend to help me move, and I won’t help friends move, either, exactly for fear of these things.
But, my moving horror story is just this - our lease was up on June 30th, and we had most of our stuff moved over to the new place already when the Uhaul truck day came. We had really just planned to move the furniture in the truck.
Come moving day, and it is 97 fucking degrees out and 98% humidity. And we have this truck for only 8 hours so we are on the go, constantly. Soaked with sweat, drinking sweet fluids constantly to keep our strength up, we were utterly miserable. When you went to the bathroom after drinking all of that liquid you had to peel your shorts and underwear away from your skin. I ended up getting a severe case of heat rash. And there’s only so naked you can get - I was wearing a tank top and shorts, but I wasn’t going any further than that.
I’m proud to know that I will never be the subject of a moving horror story. I do not like to ask for help, but the times that I have, I’ve not had ONE item that was not packed. Any weird-shaped, unpackable things have always been moved ahead of time by me, and everything else is boxed, labeled, organized & ready to go. I also feed and cocktail my helpers too.
I’ve had to help people who were half-packed and it think it’s super-rude to ask for help moving and then expect those volunteers to do packing work for you also. And imagine trying to find that teapot that got thrown into a box with a comforter and hair dryer and tampons. I mean, who wants to have to deal with that when they get to their new place?
Yaaay, I’ve been referenced! Another poster touched on it in my thread, giving advice for small boxes for books… that would have helped three months ago for my first move.
I had solicited the help of a male friend, thinking that since he’s always talking about going to the gym and lifting weights, it was finally time to put him to the test. Well, I wasn’t actively thinking “Ha, now he has to prove himself” but more absentmindedly thinking “I can use a big box for books since he’ll be strong enough to carry them”. Well, he shows up, doesn’t want to admit that the box was too heavy and starts carrying it out to the car. Oh, I should mention that the suite was on the third floor of a house, so no elevators, plus it was raining a little that day. About halfway down, he loses his grip, the box tumbles down, making a big racket. Good thing the rickety old stairs didn’t fall apart, but bad thing was somewhere along the tumble, the tape on the box broke loose and my books spill out into the wet wet wet ground. I had to throw out about half of those books.
When I worked for the people that administer the move policy for the CF, we had some good stories. The worse I heard was the moving truck that caught on fire. The family lost everything and would not even know for a few more days until they arrived at their move destination.
I had to park our large (32’?) moving truck between two large oak trees. To back out, I had to make a sharp turn into the street, and just flat couldn’t do it with the oak trees blocking my way. After numerous attempts, my wife was in tears and asked the neighbor to help direct me.
After we finally backed out, the damned cat somehow got out and off she goes down the street. By this time, it’s the middle of the night and after looking for her for about an hour, I said, “Dammit, leave the cat.” I knew she would come back to the house and we knew the woman who’d be moving into the house the next morning. She agreed to look after the cat until we could come back to get her. Luckily, she ended up adopting it for herself because it ended up having kittens because of that particular ladies’ night out.
We were towing my truck in one of those things that holds the front wheels while the back wheels spin along the road. As I was crossing the Mississippi River bridge in Baton Rouge, I felt a BAM!BAM! in my back bumper, and sure enough, one of the damned pickup tires had come loose and it was hanging on by a single tire. Luckily I made it across the bridge.
I swore that my next move would only be either to the nursing home or the funeral home.
OK, not a bad moving story, and it didn’t happen to me, but it was bad for someone, and it happened on the day I wa moving:
I was moving from an apartment some years ago, and was awaiting the moving crew. I hear a knock outside, not at my door, but on the door across the breezeway. I thought to myself that the crew had arrived and were knocking on the wrong door.
But first, I looked thru the peephole. I see a Black chap at the door, and two white guys standing on either side of the door. I thought, “This looks interesting.” The Black chap is saying something like, “This be Tyrone. I need to see you.” The person inside opens the door, and the Tyrone goes in, very orderly followed by the two White guys. . . and then about six more people that had apparently been waiting around the perimeter! I do hear one of them say something like, “This is Officer Brown, and we have a warrant for your arrest.”
I was wondering what kind of criminal activity was going on right across the breezeway from me to warrant such attention, but figured I’d never know. But I was wrong! The next day’s local paper had a front page story on how a fake id ring had been busted, and the guys across from me were part of that ring. Somebody in the ring had a job at DMV, so (I guess) had access to equipment to make official ids.
The move to our present house was accomplished in 18" of snow, plus it was below zero, and about 30 degrees below zero windchill. Luckily most of our friends are rednecks, so everyone had their Carharts (insulated outerwear) on. I found a huge stockpot and made gallons of chili and hot coffee, which I handed to everyone passing by. At one point a wife called looking for her husband, but I couldn’t tell if I’d seen him lately since everyone pretty much looked the same, with only eyes visible as they tramped in and out.
Summer of 1977. I drove a U-Haul truck full of furniture with a car hitched to the rear from a place near Bethlehem, PA to Austin, TX. My fiancee tried driving it once and was terrified, so I did all the driving. We got to Benton, AR and got run off the road by a grannylady in a Lincoln. Truck turned over, fiancee got a broken rib. The insurance adjuster opened up the back of the truck, took one look at the furniture and wrote it all off just from the way it looked.
When we got back to Austin, finally, we unpacked it. Turned out the furniture was not damaged all that much, just a few nicks and dings. I called the adjuster and he told me to forget about it and enjoy the windfall.
One of my bad habits is that I love books. I had a sizeable book collection in my apartment and decided that I needed to get rid of a lot of them, otherwise I’d have to move them one day. Coincidentally, my sister was having a rummage sale, so I took many of the books to her to sell - or give away for nothing - at it. Much to my surprise, at the end of the sale all the books I’d contributed were gone. I figured that the books would be happy in their new homes.
Cut to 2 years later. My brother was moving and I got drafted into helping him move. One of the things I had to carry out were boxes of his books which included, you guessed it, the books I’d thought I’d got rid of already. :smack:
I don’t have any real horror stories. But the last time I moved, I decided to give my friends a break and call a moving company. They managed to get everything in one load. Got to my new place and asked the night manager if I could have my key. He’d never heard of me, wasn’t told anyone was moving in, and no, the day manager and and owner were unreachable.
That was a bit of panic. But we did manage to get it straightened out. It still took a week to get phone and cable, which, despite my meticulous efforts to set up in advance, went horribly awry.
During my military career, I had to move every 2-4 years. I only had one bad move in all that time. The day of the move, I dashed out to pick up some donuts for the moving crew. I was only gone about 15 minutes, but by the time I returned, the moving truck was there, my wife was in tears, and the neighbor was ready to punch out the truck driver. WTF?! I asked my wife what the hell was happening, and she said the truck driver yelled at her and then started yelling at the neighbor’s wife about cars being parked in his way. Her husband and the driver got into a shouting match and the driver was threatening to leave without our stuff.
I was pretty steamed, so tracked the guy down, got very close up to him and said, very calmly: “My wife is inside the house, crying. You need to have a very good reason for why that is so, or you can pack up your shit and hit the road while I call your contracting officer and report your sorry ass.”
It all boiled down to the fact that he couldn’t get as close to the house as he wanted, so he threw a tantrum. Apologies all around, and he got on with the job. The neighbor kept trying to provoke a fight over the next hour, so I had to go and tell him to mind his own fucking business (I outranked him) before I had to call the military police. Jeez, what a total cockup. I’m still surprised that everything made it to the destination without breakage.
Time: the middle of second year in electronics school. I was renting a room from a guy who lived in a townhouse off Bramalea Rd in Bramalea, Ontario. In the middle of winter, he decides to move from the house to an apartment in the building across the street, taking me along as a roomie. So we pack up our stuff, the movers load the truck and drive it away, and we walk across the road to the new place.
The truck breaks down. In the middle of Bramalea Road, with both origin and destination a few hundred metres away in opposite directions. More or less here.
They fixed the truck in the middle of the road and it limped the rest of the way to the apartment’s loading area. But it was kind of embarassing for all concerned.
I was moving into a place with my reasonably new boyfriend. I was in one apartment in Fairport NY and he was sharing a house in Henrietta NY. I was all packed up, boxes all labeled, furniture packed correctly for whatever type it was, taken apart and fasteners baggied and taped to the piece, the whole deal.
I had made an arrangement with my boss at work for the small truck, a 14 foot box van. A couple of big hefty guys from work were suitably bribed with promises of beer, pizza and weed [hey it was the early 80s] so they [relatively] happily schlepped my stuff off the second floor of one building, into the truck and over to the 3d floor of the new place.
Keith on the other hand, he and his roomies were sitting around watching tv, and nothing was packed, they were all stoned and they were supposedly going to be helping move. Nothing was said when they didn’t show up to move my stuff, and we couldn’t call them because the phone had been disconnected because of the move.
So here we show up and nothing is done. For 3 hours I literally had to stand there and force Keith into sorting his shit out and packing it so my guys could haul stuff down to the truck while his roomies sat there and drank and smoked.
The idiots followed us over to the new place, and sat around while my guys hauled stuff upstairs, so I decided fuck it, I got my guys, and we went to a local steak house and I treated them to this fantastic dinner. Keith and his buddies whinged about hte lack of beer pizza and weed so I told them all off. Fucking morons. I should have refused to let him move in with me when that crap happened but lust is blind…
