The Moving Chronicles: Actually Moving

We sprang up bright and early at 7am on Moving Day, which was last Sunday the... 29th I believe. The movers were due to arrive at 8am so in short order we packed up all the last-minute stuff, stuffed the dog in the bathroom along with our suitcases so as to make sure neither she nor they were loaded into the truck, and then... waited. And waited.

Everybody knows that when you move you are at the mercy of the movers. And the last thing you want to do is piss them off. If you didn't have all your kitchen equipment packed, you would have cooked a three-course meal for them which would be piping hot upon their arrival, and in order to avoid taxing them too much you try to load as much of your own furniture as possible. All this because as soon as they have all of your wordly posessions on their truck, they hold every single card.So when 9am came and went, I left a very chirpy, very breezy message for the moving company: "Hey, this is Karen! I thought you guys were coming at 8am! I must have misunderstood! Please give me a call whenever you get a chance! If it's not too much trouble!"

Around 10:30 I received a call from Victor, who is Russian, so it is pronounced "veek-tore." Veektore's English was not very good, nor was his cell phone reception, but he managed to inform me groggily that he just woke up and he'd be there in an hour or so."Okay!" I chirped. "No problem!" And promptly slumped potato-sack like on the couch, because I had not had my coffee and the situation was quickly becoming a medical need. When I hired the movers, the salesman, who spoke perfect English and was extremely charming, natch, estimated our posessions to weigh approximately 4,500 pounds, which in moving terms was "nothing" and would take "hardly any time at all." So based on this information I had made a series of ridiculous assumptions: 1) the movers would show up at 8am; 2) the movers would take only a couple hours to move all our stuff onto the truck; 3) we didn't really own that much stuff; 4) we would be on the road, and thus I would be able to buy coffee somewhere, by 11am at the latest.

Tom, who understands but does not like or appreciate my medical need for coffee, offered to drive up to the local bagel shop and pick some up for me. This was extremely generous of him because attached to the car was a small trailer loaded with approximately (and for once I am not exaggerating) 1,500 pounds of the stuff we considered too valuable to let the movers handle.I continued to wallow like something sub-human on the couch until, a little after 11, I heard the distinct grumble of a very large truck. As the dog started to bark frantically from the bathroom, I lept up, summoned every ounce of reserve energy I had, and greeted Veektore like a long-lost friend.

Veektore turned out to be about a hundred feet tall. He was a big, solid man. So just in case there was any possible ire rising up at his three-hour tardiness, the desire to express it was now firmly squelched. Veektore had also apparently treated himself to a real Russian breakfast of straight Vodka, if one was to guess by his breath, and spoke as if he should be busy making "big trouble for Moose and Squirrel" rather than driving a truck in Alabama. (I stole this line from an old Murphy Brown episode when Murphy meets a rival Russian reporter. I couldn't help it; it's too good to pass up in regards to the Russian mover.)

After about forty-five minutes of paperwork, in which I signed away my rights to anything, including my own posessions, Veektore and his cohort, whose name I did not catch and whose English sucked worse than Veektore's, got down to work. By "got down to work" I mean, brought one or two boxes out onto the street at a time (where they remained in the burning noon sun, forming a giant pile of our stuff that the neighbors enjoyed perusing as they slowly drove by on their way home from church) in between answering their cell phones, which rang approximately every two minutes (again, this is not an exaggeration). Veektore caught up with all his distant relatives while our boxes remained sitting in the middle of the street for the next 6 hours.

Sometimes Veektore would hang up the phone to graciously wrap a piece of our furniture with forty-seven blankets and about a million yards of shrink-wrap, for which we were being charged by the foot. I watched in dismay, desperately trying to keep the cheerful, optimistic, "no problem Veektore!" expression on my face, as I ticked off the cost in my head. When Veektore was done wrapping our furniture - any one piece of which took approximately an hour - I swear you could drop it from the top of the

Empire

State

Building and it would remain intact. "For safety," Veektore explained helpfully, as he wound the tenth layer of shrink-wrap around our TV. He banged on it for good measure with his giant paw-like fist while Tom cringed and almost threw up in alarm.The afternoon found Tom and me lounging on the floor of the study, which by 3pm was the only empty room in the house, and that is because it started out empty. We had gotten rid of all the study furniture before the move. Tom took a little snooze on the floor while I watched our stuff melt in the middle of the street while Veektore paced the living room, talking animatedly into his cell phone in Russian.At 5pm, Veektore announced they were finished. Tom and I picked ourselves up off the floor and stumbled to sign the last dozen or so forms. These forms may have been agreements to give Veektore our first-born child but I wouldn't have cared. I just wanted to get out of there already. We had a seven hour road-trip planned for that day and had intended to be in

St Louis by nighttime. That was no longer going to happen.We were about 20 minutes outside of town when Veektore called me on my cell phone. "I weigh truck," he grumbled. "Ees seven towsand pounds you haf." What Veektore seemed unaware of is that the price originally quoted, based on 4,500 pounds, had just doubled for us. But I didn't really care, because for the next ten to twenty one days it was Veektore's problem to lug it around, not mine.

So what I did was, I laughed.