Here is how it usually goes down...
The moment you realize that you are going to be moving you start thinking to yourself "Hmm, I can go ahead and start packing up all the stuff we rarely ever use and then we won't have so much to do later". You begin scrounging around the house looking for as many boxes or makeshift boxes as you can to cover this preemptive attempt to look organized. Soon you discover yourself in a pickle because most of your boxes are already in use and so you must now locate more boxes.
Off to the supermarket you go where you ask the store manager if you can have any extra boxes that they may have laying around only to get the response “I’m sorry but we crush our boxes at night when the stockers are through emptying them but let me go check and see if I can find any”. The manager returns with a handful of small boxes that appear fit to store small nick-knacks or your used chewing gum collection. You spend the rest of the afternoon looking and smelling like a bag-lady as you scope all the dumpsters that you can find where you manage to pull a few medium size boxes, a large half ripped refrigerator box and some partially popped bubble wrap (you know, for those expensive glass Flintstones mugs that you inherited from your mom).
That evening you make a quick trip to the hardware store to get the cheapest masking tape that you can find along with a few black sharpies that you are planning on using to mark every single box according to content, room etc. When you arrive back at your house you’re too tired to do any packing so you decide to start calling up some friends in order to find that perfect helper (you know, the one with the truck).
Thirty-seven or so phone calls later you finally locate that one guy with a truck who is willing to help you out. Of course we use the term ‘help you out’ lightly because it’s more of a money making scheme that this guy has in mind as he states his demands for you to pay for all gas costs, labor expenses and even flip for dinner when it’s all over. Oh, and he has a bad back so you have to get someone else to help lift the heavy stuff (which really sucks considering that that was going to be your excuse).
The next day you start boxing up your rarely used items, taping them neatly and professionally, marking them each with care and pushing them away into the corner of the room where they quietly sit awaiting for the day that you actually move (which is approximately 3 weeks away). You spend the next three weeks anticipating every step of the move and even clean your house from top to bottom so that the packing process will be that much easier when the time comes.
A few days before moving time you decide to start packing but first you have to re-pack all of the stuff that you packed neatly away in the corner of the room three weeks ago. This is because everything that you rarely have a need for suddenly became the most important stuff in your house now that it became virtually unattainable. They now sit strung throughout the room with useless pieces of tape stuck hanging off of the boxes and mixed up to the point that the labeling that you did to them is absolutely useless at this point.
Moving day arrives and so does the guy with the truck which instead of being empty has a bed full of dirt, a couple of tire irons, two flat tires and soggy piles of leaves in it. The guy that was supposed to help you lift the heavy stuff has not yet arrived and so you decide to go ahead and make a quick trip with just the light stuff and a few heavy boxes that you lifted yourself. In the process of doing this, you make a mental note to not use the largest box to store all the books and magazines in instead of using separate smaller boxes and just make the extra few trips to the door without injury.
When you arrive at the new place you decide that everything will be placed in their correct rooms according to the label so that unpacking will be that much easier later. But of course this proves to be ineffective because the guy with the truck is now just following you into whichever room you are going into and dropping the boxes anywhere. Besides, half of the boxes were never labeled to begin with because you got in such a hurry throwing piles of clothing and loose odds and ends into boxes at the last minute prompting you to forget that part.
You arrive back at the other house to find a note stuck in the door that reads “I came to help you move but you weren’t here. Call me on my cell when you get home”. You would call him up but you don’t remember his phone number and it is stored into the phone that you sent to the other house on your first trip. So you two decide to grab some more light stuff only to find that there is no such things at this point and make a mental note to call the other guy up when you get to the new house again. As you are struggling to take the heavy boxes out to the truck and setting them neatly in with the flat tires and sludge, the guy with the truck is sitting in the cab having a smoke and sipping on a big gulp of flat soda. The radio is playing just loud enough for you to overhear the forecast calling for some scattered showers. Then panic starts to set in because half of your makeshift boxes don’t have any lids to them. You throw a few hints at the guy that there are just a few boxes left to bring out to the truck on this trip in order to get him to help you out only to get the subtle response “OK” without even looking over his shoulder to notice you. You nonchalantly throw a quick but quiet “Mind helping me grab the last few?” and this is when he decides to mention (for the first time) that he has an appointment to go to in a couple of hours and that maybe you two should speed it up a bit.
Arriving back at the new place, you call up your other friend and he decides to meet you at the first house in about a half-hour because you made the mistake of mentioning that you just now arrived at the new house to unload. You unload quickly (mostly by yourself) and rush back to the other house to get started on the big and heavy stuff.
Now back at the first house, you find yourself sitting around and waiting for the other guy who has not arrived yet even though it’s been a half-hour. Another forty-five minutes go by and you’re still waiting. Finally he pulls up in a nice big brand new pickup truck and this is when it suddenly dawns on you that you never thought to ask him what kind of vehicle he drives. To your surprise, he offers to use his truck so that you can get this done much quicker cause it’s supposed to rain soon. To your dismay, the guy that you paid to begin with now claims that he has to go to his appointment and will return after he is done (which is estimated to be about eight or nine PM and the appointment, by the way, turns out to be simply taking his girlfriend’s lunch to her at work and sitting with her through her lunch break).
For the next hour or so everything seems to be going fine with the exception of having to remove the legs from all the furniture in order to barely get it through the door and pulling all the drawers from the dressers only to discover that you forgot to pack the stuff that’s in them. So when you arrive at the new house, you pile all the furniture up in the living room, throw all the empty drawers on the couch and then heave the garbage bags full of clean clothes across the master bedroom. Knowing that you only have a trip or two left, everything seems to start looking up until you step outside and feel the few drops of random rain smacking you in the face and making quiet little noises that almost sound like “Ha Ha, you’re screwed”. Remembering that you still have a large TV and some other electrical appliances to bring over to the new house, you run back in and grab a large blanket to use as a tarp for the next trip. At this point you make another mental note that you should always move the electrical appliances on the first trip next time.
You arrive at the first house and quickly load up all the appliances and loose things that are laying around and throw the blanket over the top of it just before the rain starts to pick up. You are quite certain that you are on your last trip to the new house when you hear your buddy holler across the empty echoing house “Hey what about this stuff in the back closet? Is that going?” Your heart sinks at the sound of that along with the sudden realization that you never packed all the food yet that still sits in the fridge, pantry and cabinets. “One more trip!” you holler back.
You take the quick trip back to the new home and unload the wet appliances from the back of the truck where you discover that the blanket had blown off on the way there and is nowhere to be found. (Another mental note: Dry all the appliances later before plugging them in. Better yet, also wait a day or two just in case.) You grab a few of the pre-used boxes after dumping stuff wherever you can find an empty area of floor so that you can use them to pack up the food.
You two return to the first house once more to pack and load the food and the contents of the back closet including about fifty sets of clothing hanging on hangers. There is no room in the boxes so you drape them neatly over the other boxes in the truck as they slide down into messy tangled heaps in between them. Then you grab the next arm full of hung up cloths and throw them aimlessly down into the trucks with the rest of the heap and throw a heavy box on top of them in order to prevent them from meeting the same awkward fate as your favorite blanket on the last trip.
As you are crawling into the truck to haul the last load, you suddenly realize that you already moved all the cleaning supplies to the other house so you decide to come back the next day to do the cleaning (which we both know will never happen).
You arrive safely at the new house in time for the rain to start coming down just hard enough to be called a monsoon and instead of waiting it out, you run frantically back and forth getting everything unloaded in record time (10 minutes) and just in time for the rain to suddenly stop. The first guy returns with the other truck as if publicly displaying his tremendous psychic abilities to know exactly when you will be done and remarking about what hell you will be going through because you still have to unpack and clean the house yet.
All is not lost when the second guy refuses your offer to pay him for his troubles even though you didn’t have a dime left to your name anyway. He climbs back into his truck and waves as he wishes you good luck in your new home and then drives away. Everything suddenly gets quiet as you gaze awkwardly over at the first guy who failed to do even half of what he got paid to do and hoping to God that he doesn’t bring up the fact that…
“So… When do I get that dinner?”
Written By: John W. Martin
http://www.yallways.com
The moment you realize that you are going to be moving you start thinking to yourself "Hmm, I can go ahead and start packing up all the stuff we rarely ever use and then we won't have so much to do later". You begin scrounging around the house looking for as many boxes or makeshift boxes as you can to cover this preemptive attempt to look organized. Soon you discover yourself in a pickle because most of your boxes are already in use and so you must now locate more boxes.
Off to the supermarket you go where you ask the store manager if you can have any extra boxes that they may have laying around only to get the response “I’m sorry but we crush our boxes at night when the stockers are through emptying them but let me go check and see if I can find any”. The manager returns with a handful of small boxes that appear fit to store small nick-knacks or your used chewing gum collection. You spend the rest of the afternoon looking and smelling like a bag-lady as you scope all the dumpsters that you can find where you manage to pull a few medium size boxes, a large half ripped refrigerator box and some partially popped bubble wrap (you know, for those expensive glass Flintstones mugs that you inherited from your mom).
That evening you make a quick trip to the hardware store to get the cheapest masking tape that you can find along with a few black sharpies that you are planning on using to mark every single box according to content, room etc. When you arrive back at your house you’re too tired to do any packing so you decide to start calling up some friends in order to find that perfect helper (you know, the one with the truck).
Thirty-seven or so phone calls later you finally locate that one guy with a truck who is willing to help you out. Of course we use the term ‘help you out’ lightly because it’s more of a money making scheme that this guy has in mind as he states his demands for you to pay for all gas costs, labor expenses and even flip for dinner when it’s all over. Oh, and he has a bad back so you have to get someone else to help lift the heavy stuff (which really sucks considering that that was going to be your excuse).
The next day you start boxing up your rarely used items, taping them neatly and professionally, marking them each with care and pushing them away into the corner of the room where they quietly sit awaiting for the day that you actually move (which is approximately 3 weeks away). You spend the next three weeks anticipating every step of the move and even clean your house from top to bottom so that the packing process will be that much easier when the time comes.
A few days before moving time you decide to start packing but first you have to re-pack all of the stuff that you packed neatly away in the corner of the room three weeks ago. This is because everything that you rarely have a need for suddenly became the most important stuff in your house now that it became virtually unattainable. They now sit strung throughout the room with useless pieces of tape stuck hanging off of the boxes and mixed up to the point that the labeling that you did to them is absolutely useless at this point.
Moving day arrives and so does the guy with the truck which instead of being empty has a bed full of dirt, a couple of tire irons, two flat tires and soggy piles of leaves in it. The guy that was supposed to help you lift the heavy stuff has not yet arrived and so you decide to go ahead and make a quick trip with just the light stuff and a few heavy boxes that you lifted yourself. In the process of doing this, you make a mental note to not use the largest box to store all the books and magazines in instead of using separate smaller boxes and just make the extra few trips to the door without injury.
When you arrive at the new place you decide that everything will be placed in their correct rooms according to the label so that unpacking will be that much easier later. But of course this proves to be ineffective because the guy with the truck is now just following you into whichever room you are going into and dropping the boxes anywhere. Besides, half of the boxes were never labeled to begin with because you got in such a hurry throwing piles of clothing and loose odds and ends into boxes at the last minute prompting you to forget that part.
You arrive back at the other house to find a note stuck in the door that reads “I came to help you move but you weren’t here. Call me on my cell when you get home”. You would call him up but you don’t remember his phone number and it is stored into the phone that you sent to the other house on your first trip. So you two decide to grab some more light stuff only to find that there is no such things at this point and make a mental note to call the other guy up when you get to the new house again. As you are struggling to take the heavy boxes out to the truck and setting them neatly in with the flat tires and sludge, the guy with the truck is sitting in the cab having a smoke and sipping on a big gulp of flat soda. The radio is playing just loud enough for you to overhear the forecast calling for some scattered showers. Then panic starts to set in because half of your makeshift boxes don’t have any lids to them. You throw a few hints at the guy that there are just a few boxes left to bring out to the truck on this trip in order to get him to help you out only to get the subtle response “OK” without even looking over his shoulder to notice you. You nonchalantly throw a quick but quiet “Mind helping me grab the last few?” and this is when he decides to mention (for the first time) that he has an appointment to go to in a couple of hours and that maybe you two should speed it up a bit.
Arriving back at the new place, you call up your other friend and he decides to meet you at the first house in about a half-hour because you made the mistake of mentioning that you just now arrived at the new house to unload. You unload quickly (mostly by yourself) and rush back to the other house to get started on the big and heavy stuff.
Now back at the first house, you find yourself sitting around and waiting for the other guy who has not arrived yet even though it’s been a half-hour. Another forty-five minutes go by and you’re still waiting. Finally he pulls up in a nice big brand new pickup truck and this is when it suddenly dawns on you that you never thought to ask him what kind of vehicle he drives. To your surprise, he offers to use his truck so that you can get this done much quicker cause it’s supposed to rain soon. To your dismay, the guy that you paid to begin with now claims that he has to go to his appointment and will return after he is done (which is estimated to be about eight or nine PM and the appointment, by the way, turns out to be simply taking his girlfriend’s lunch to her at work and sitting with her through her lunch break).
For the next hour or so everything seems to be going fine with the exception of having to remove the legs from all the furniture in order to barely get it through the door and pulling all the drawers from the dressers only to discover that you forgot to pack the stuff that’s in them. So when you arrive at the new house, you pile all the furniture up in the living room, throw all the empty drawers on the couch and then heave the garbage bags full of clean clothes across the master bedroom. Knowing that you only have a trip or two left, everything seems to start looking up until you step outside and feel the few drops of random rain smacking you in the face and making quiet little noises that almost sound like “Ha Ha, you’re screwed”. Remembering that you still have a large TV and some other electrical appliances to bring over to the new house, you run back in and grab a large blanket to use as a tarp for the next trip. At this point you make another mental note that you should always move the electrical appliances on the first trip next time.
You arrive at the first house and quickly load up all the appliances and loose things that are laying around and throw the blanket over the top of it just before the rain starts to pick up. You are quite certain that you are on your last trip to the new house when you hear your buddy holler across the empty echoing house “Hey what about this stuff in the back closet? Is that going?” Your heart sinks at the sound of that along with the sudden realization that you never packed all the food yet that still sits in the fridge, pantry and cabinets. “One more trip!” you holler back.
You take the quick trip back to the new home and unload the wet appliances from the back of the truck where you discover that the blanket had blown off on the way there and is nowhere to be found. (Another mental note: Dry all the appliances later before plugging them in. Better yet, also wait a day or two just in case.) You grab a few of the pre-used boxes after dumping stuff wherever you can find an empty area of floor so that you can use them to pack up the food.
You two return to the first house once more to pack and load the food and the contents of the back closet including about fifty sets of clothing hanging on hangers. There is no room in the boxes so you drape them neatly over the other boxes in the truck as they slide down into messy tangled heaps in between them. Then you grab the next arm full of hung up cloths and throw them aimlessly down into the trucks with the rest of the heap and throw a heavy box on top of them in order to prevent them from meeting the same awkward fate as your favorite blanket on the last trip.
As you are crawling into the truck to haul the last load, you suddenly realize that you already moved all the cleaning supplies to the other house so you decide to come back the next day to do the cleaning (which we both know will never happen).
You arrive safely at the new house in time for the rain to start coming down just hard enough to be called a monsoon and instead of waiting it out, you run frantically back and forth getting everything unloaded in record time (10 minutes) and just in time for the rain to suddenly stop. The first guy returns with the other truck as if publicly displaying his tremendous psychic abilities to know exactly when you will be done and remarking about what hell you will be going through because you still have to unpack and clean the house yet.
All is not lost when the second guy refuses your offer to pay him for his troubles even though you didn’t have a dime left to your name anyway. He climbs back into his truck and waves as he wishes you good luck in your new home and then drives away. Everything suddenly gets quiet as you gaze awkwardly over at the first guy who failed to do even half of what he got paid to do and hoping to God that he doesn’t bring up the fact that…
“So… When do I get that dinner?”
Written By: John W. Martin
http://www.yallways.com
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