Musings on Movers
I hate movers. I love movers. Yes, I have a love/hate relationship with movers.
I love it when they come to your house and pack up all of your stuff in one day. I hate it when they break your cherished crap and try to get out of paying you for the items they destroy.
My last run-in with movers involved our move from our house here in Portland to the condo we are renting in Portland. We paid a national moving company to pack, move, and unpack our belongings. The moving day started well. Tom was stationed at the house to supervise the move out (they had two crews working) and to ready the house for the new buyers, and I was at the condo moving in boxes and putting stuff in closets and drawers that the movers unpacked and set on the floor.
Halfway through the day, one crew went home. Then everything unraveled.
We got a call that Zelda was sick and we had to go pick her up from school and take her to the doctor (ear infection). As soon as the appointment was over, Tom had to go back and pick up Zoe at the end of school. So he was out of action for most of the afternoon. About the time Tom got back, he had to leave again for a class. Upon his departure, it became apparent that the crew that had left the job half way through the day had screwed the remaining moving crew because they put everything in the condo in the wrong order–we were hemmed in and couldn’t move, unpack or place furniture. A large chunk of stuff had to be moved out and then replaced in the condo.
On top of it all, the movers had underestimated the amount of hours the job would take, and the crew chief tried to pull a fast one and get out of the scope of work they had agreed to. When I wouldn’t let him weasel out of the job, he started opening my boxes and throwing the stuff out of them onto the floor in one big dump
I wigged out. I had a vomiting kid with a high fever, I had been moving and unpacking for 10 hours side-by-side with the various moving crews, Tom was gone, movers were throwing my stuff around the house, and some asshole was trying to tell me he didn’t want to finish his job because he had somewhere to go. (He pulled the passive aggressive male strategy of “I’m going to be so awful she will let me off the hook because she’s a woman and won’t want to deal with a man being truly icky.”)
I got so mad I dropped about a million f-bombs and told the crew chief he was a **&$$%@##. The kids freaked out and stayed in their room. I called Tom and told him he “better get his butt home” and hung up the phone. (He and Ian still laugh about that telephone call. Tom turned to Ian and said, “uh-oh.”)
In the end, the movers stayed and finished their job. The worker bees apologized to me for their crew chief being a complete tool and thanked me for working so hard with them side-by-side. Needless to say, it has become a funny family story that we all laugh about. (Well, I’m still working on the laughing part.)
That experience, along with our other two cross-country sojourns (don’t worry, I won’t tell those stories), has made me rethink this next move. (Yes, that means I will be posting in the future regarding my current moving and storage strategies! Woo hoo!!)
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