Related Posts

Moving Right Along …

I’m sitting here reading about how a Canadian won the World Rock, Paper, Scissors Championship and wondering, what the fuck am I doing wrong here. The guy won about $4000, but most importantly gets the covetted title of Rock, Paper, Scissors Champion to the world. To think, I could have been watching that instead of helping some friends move.

Moving is one of those really weird things where you find out who your friends really are. When Wifey™ and I moved a few months ago, the only person to really offer some help was my mom. She’s old and has bad knees but still came over a few weekends and helped load and haul boxes from one apartment to the next. The friends we helped move this weekend only offered their truck and a lot of excuses as to why they were really busy during the weekends we were moving. Ugh.

So, you have to wonder why we’d even offer our help to them. The answer is simply that we have no idea — maybe we are just nice like that. Like I said, you find out who your friends are.

Now, common sense would dictate that when you ask people to help you move and these friends put aside a weekend to help you move, at the very least, you’d be prepared. This wasn’t the case when Wifey™ and I arrived on Saturday morning ready to start packing boxes into our car.

The night before I mentioned that “if everything was packed when we arrived, we should be able to knock it out by the end of the day”. I specifically said that because I’ve moved one of them before and based on experience knew that there was a chance we’d get there and nothing would be packed. And guess what? When Wifey™ and I arrived, there were about fifteen packed boxes sitting near their front door and that was only 10% of their entire apartment.

The kitchen hadn’t been touched. Every cabinet was full. The bedroom had been touched, but nothing was boxed. Everything was just strewn all over the floor. The living room was also not packed up. Their audio/video equipment was still hooked up, their computer was still hooked up, there were full drawers in dressers that we were supposed to be moving and they had no where near enough boxes to put everything in. Preparation was obviously not part of the plan … but somehow we got about half the apartment moved that day. No where near what we could have gotten done had their been some preparation. Then around 5PM everyone just gave up and stopped.

The next day I offered to help haul a mattress and a shelf unit out of the apartment to my friend mom’s house. It ended up being a three hour trip, even though we were actively working the entire time. The car ride was just really long. We arrived back at their new apartment around 3PM, ate and pretty much got the idea that they were done for the day. Sunday only one load was transferred from the old apartment to the new one. Another wasted day in my opinion.

Now the two of them have only a couple of days to transfer the rest of their crap between apartments and still clean up the old apartment. Good luck. In my opinion, they totally didn’t use the people they had for the weekend to their fullest. We were all willing and able to move as much stuff as possible and in the end only got about half their stuff transferred in the two days. Even the father of one of our friends said, “we’ve put aside this day to help you, so you might as well use us as much as possible.” Who knows. We’re done. We did our good deed and it’s up to them to figure it out from here.

One of the biggest problems came from, not only their lack of preparation, but also when it came to trying to help them unpack. My friends wife wanted to be consulted about every single decision regarding unpacking, which was slowing down the process immensely. I can totally understand wanting your stuff put away in a certain way or place, but I think when you’ve asked people to help you unpack, you have to expect that you’ll probably have to do some reorganizing later on. The other big problem came from their accumulation of useless papers and clutter. We’re talking about random, useless pieces of paper that they are saving for God knows what. Boxes and boxes and boxes full of crap that should have hit the landfill decades ago. There’s no way in hell that their one bedroom apartment has the storage capacity for all that stuff. Again not my problem, but annoying none the less.

Wifey™ and I left the weekend feeling a little frustrated that we didn’t get done as much as we’d hoped. Almost like we wasted our weekend by helping them move. We’d hoped that the first day could be spent transferring everything and the second day could be spent helping them unpack. In the end, we moved half their apartment and of that half, only unpacked about half of the stuff that was transferred.

Oh well, like I said, we did our part and now its up to them. I guess everyone just works in different ways. For them, they’ll be spending the rest of the week balancing work and moving because they’ve only got until Friday to get everything out of their old apartment. Sucks to be them right now.

 Print This Post
  Link to this Entry