If your're planning to move, just say NO!

I hate moving. That being said, perhaps some history is in order. As an Air Force brat, I moved almost every year or so of my life until my dad retired when I was in the 7th grade. What a pain! We even moved to Okinawa, Japan for 2 1/2 years, staying in temporary housing, off-base housing, and then moving into on-base housing before striking out for home again. If I thought those moves were bad, especially the Japan one where all of our possessions "safely" tucked into storage burned to the ground stateside, boy was I wrong! This move to New York has been one for my record book.

I will admit that, between all of the disasters I had while my Darling Husband was away in Boston for a month before the move, the dislocated hip, the D.H. being in Boston, home-schooling two kids, sorting our fabulous stash of personal possessions, and the busy-ness of being a single parent, I fell a bit short in the vacuuming and dusting department. And the kids did manage to dump two bags of shredded mail in the house before the truck driver got there. And the youngest decided to shred styrofoam with a butter knife all over the house, which is impossible to unstick from anything short of using a napalm or nuclear bomb. But, in fact, things were essentially ready to go; the driver was just not happy to be doing our move, I guess. Which must be why the driver, who has probably never even been home long enough to change a diaper on his own offspring if he has them, questioned what I had been doing for the last few weeks; I took some exception to that. I was really busy. I would have offered him a list, but there weren't enough boxes left after all the packing to hold the whole thing anyway.

The driver, after questioning my housewifery, then proceeded to stage my D.H.'s formidable technical library, about 40 boxes of books, on our front lawn, as the rain clouds gathered and rolled. . .you guessed it. The heavens opened, and for five minutes the most spectacular fall shower drenched the book boxes. Have I ever mentioned how fanatical my husband is about his technical library? If I ask him to tidy his study, he takes this to mean that a book is out of place and will spend an entire day taking the books off the shelf and reorganizing them, replacing them on the shelves in alphabetical order by subject. He doesn't do any cleaning as the rest of us understand it, he just dotes on the books. Imagine his response the the truck driver's blatant disregard to his treasures. About the time the truck driver affixed a tarp across the books, the rain stopped.

Then the fun really began. The lumpers taped some mattress boxes to our stairs and proceeded to dump all of our personal possessions from the second floor down to the first via this precarious and impromtu chute. The first spectacular crash resounded from my prized sewing machine; not content to merely launch it, the movers dumped it "ass over teakettle" down their ramp. I am not a swearing mom on the whole, but I walked right up to the so-called catcher at the bottom of the stairs and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing with my sewing machine. As bad as these two incidents were, it only got worse from there.

By the time they were done loading, at 1:00 a.m. on Thanksgiving day, the driver and his crew had also managed to:

1.) Crash our t.v. set into our hallway wall.

2.) Crash the swingset into our wooden fence so hard that they detached it from our house.

3.) Break one of our bookcases across the loading ramp because they staged all the tall furniture on the front lawn just as the wind whipped up. Truck driver then proceeded to tell the boss that it was such a piece of junk that it just "fell apart" in the front yard.

4.) Break the mailbox in front of our house.

5.) Destroy every lamp we owned as they loaded them.

6.) Fracture half of our plastice storage tubs launching them down the "ramp."

7.) Carpet our front lawn with cigarette butts and trash from their snacks and drinks.

8.) Lose the rolling shelf out of our entertainment center.

9.) Totally freak out three kids with their bad attitudes and rough treatment of our stuff.

The list of what they broke during the move is truly unbelievable. Most of the damage we have found so far appears to relate specifically to how the cargo was loaded. Most of the antiques suffered some degree of damage, all lamps, mattresses and furniture were filthy because they didn't bother to box or wrap them, every weld on my antique sled was fractured, our autistic son's loft bed was demolished, bookcases broken; the list is amazing. We would have been better off to have left it all and just bought new, the damage was so extensive and distressing, especially to the kids who had watched the unpleasant driver and crew destroy their things during the loading. The driver even "lost" our list of high value items the packers left for him---twice! We have to keep supplying from our official copies.

All I can say is, when it comes to moving, even corporate moves, document everything! Take videos before, during, and after. And if you have a problem with a truck driver from the minute he steps into your house, send him "packing!" The amount of damage he can do to your stuff is truly formidable, and just not worth it. We should have simply had the company send another driver, even if it delayed our move, and save ourselves a lot of pain.

Even if they really pay out on everything, we still get to do all the leg work to replace our stuff. As I said yesterday, what made me think that moving to upstate New York would be a good idea? It wasn't fun at all! It's awfully pretty, though.