I’m in the process of packing up to move out at the end of the month. Time will tell, but so far so good, for which I am grateful. My history with moves is checkered, but none ever as bad as the one 30 years ago, when our family moved from Connecticut to Massachusetts. Here is what I wrote at the time:
TOP TEN WAYS YOU CAN TELL YOU’RE IN A MOVE FROM YOU KNOW WHERE
1. The moving truck is too big to get up the driveway.
2. The Tin Man
“But the sales guy said for sure if we went with the smaller truck, there’d be no problem.”
3. There are no magicians in the house.
“I don’t know what to tell you, lady, but this truck ain’t going up that driveway.”
So the boss crew chief drives off in his car to go find us a shuttle that WILL go up the driveway. The worker bees, under the sous crew chief, stay behind with the express job of moving the furniture out of the house and onto the front lawn.
4. Labor unrest.
A couple of hours go by and the big boss man hasn’t come back. At some point, there appears to be a work stoppage. It had all the makings of a cigarette break, but after 30 minutes of it, I got curious and just had to ask.
“Lady, what’s out here on the lawn isn’t all going to fit in that truck down there. There is no point in us bringing out more. It isn’t going to fit.”
5. The Tin Man comes in for the kill.
“But the sales guy said for sure everything we have would fit.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, lady, but it ain’t going to fit.”
6. Failure to communicate
“Let’s call the boss, see what he says, OK?”
So we call the boss, who’s found a shuttle to haul our stuff down the driveway. It’s 40 miles away, but he’s heading out now, so he should be back in a couple of hours.
“What about the truck being too small?”
“Lady, I’ll deal with that when I get there. Put Joe on.”
It’s hard to say what boss man had to tell Joe, but whatever it was, it didn’t impress Joe.
7. Labor unrest turns into a strike
Joe gathers the rest of the guys together, holds a quick vote, and the results favor strike action. Now.
Strike action is averted. Or at least postponed. After a pitcher of lemonade and cookies, and their grievances aired, all parties agreed that we’d all been shafted by the same people, we had a common enemy – but that a little solidarity was called for. I was sympathetic to their cause, who wouldn’t be, my heart is bleeding, but there is this little matter of a house that needs moving. Could they possibly find the compassion for us that we felt for them? We reached a compromise: They agreed to work to get everything on the truck. Then they’d quit.
Sounded good to me.
8. Surly Boss Man
True to his word, a couple of hours later, the boss man shows up with the shuttle and the wheels of production go into motion once again. By four o’clock in the afternoon, a quarter of the furniture is on the truck, half of it is on the lawn and another quarter is still in the house. Still no word from the boss man whether it’s all going to fit. I decide it’s time to put the question to him and head down the driveway to the truck. It was right at this point in the day, having come to a fork in the road, that we decided to go down the “let’s see just how much worse we can make this” path. I stepped onto the truck, causing our dog’s bucket of food to topple over, sending 20 pounds of kibble flying. Everywhere.
Giving me a look that said I was entirely to blame for every single thing that had gone wrong today and would I just get off his damn truck, and lady, by the way, it ain’t all going to fit.
9. When all else fails, turn to prayer.
Everyone throws up their hands, but my husband has the smarts to go looking for another truck. He comes back a couple of hours later with the promise that if the truck that’s meant to be back on the lot by 11 p.m. comes in, then it’s ours for the next day. It’s the best we’ve got. It occurs to us to get us some religion and start praying.
10. Worker unrest turns into work to rule.
It takes a couple more hours to fill the truck. I’m sitting in the La-Z-Boy out on the front lawn (it hadn’t made the cut) around eight o’clock, not entirely sure how this is all going to turn out. The truck is full to the brim. There’s a lot of stuff on the front lawn, but it’s all out of the house at least. But we can’t leave it on the lawn; there’s rain called for tomorrow. So everything has to go into the basement and garage. And the worker guys (our veritable comrades in arms) were starting to grumble about their side of the equation: Here it was eight, they’d been hired to work until six; it happened every single time. They quit. Lemonade and cookies weren’t going to do the trick this time. But money did, and eventually everything got inside. Somewhere around 2:30 in the morning, lying on the hard bedroom floor because there was nothing better to do at that hour of the morning – because, of course, all the beds had made the cut – and I was sussing the situation: In the next 12 hours, we have to load up the U-Haul with about a third of our household belongings, close on the Connecticut house, pick up the kids, get the U-Haul into storage in Bridgeport (we’d be coming back on the weekend to pick it up), and get ourselves up to Massachusetts to close on that house at 2:30 that afternoon. If we started now, we just might make it. And that wasn’t even taking into account the unloading at the other end. You just knew the truck wasn’t going to make it up that driveway either.
Today, we have music from Clarence Carter …
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