DIY Moving Sucks Big Balls

Notice that these people are NOT smiling. And they have only unloaded two fucking boxes from the van. Wussies.

Where the hell have I been for ten fricking days?? Ohhhhh ho ho. I’ve been moving, that’s where. Son-of-a-bitching moving. Godforsaken moving. The apocalypse of moving.

You know, I don’t mind physical exertion or even really hard work at the end of which I realize that 12 or 14 hours has elapsed, but I was so busy and focused that I didn’t notice. I don’t mind sweating—even though it shorts out my hearing aids—or aching muscles or a few cuts and bruises. But. You know on Looney Tunes cartoons when Wile E. Coyote gets squashed by an anvil and then blown-up into bits and then run over by a train, and then he falls off a tall cliff and stabs his body into the hot, hard floor of the desert? I am Wile E. Coyote. And I wasn’t even trying to catch Road Runner. I just wanted to save $5000 by moving myself instead of hiring a goddamned moving company to do all the loading and driving for me.

In the words of Vivian Ward from Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts’s incredibly realistic gorgeous and innocent prostitute—because no real hookers have meth-addict skin, straggly hair, yeast infections and fat rolls: Big mistake. Big. Huge.

I won’t name names here to keep my ass from getting in some kind of legal boiling pot, but the move-it-yourself company we chose is the kind where you stuff your shit in a truck, and then YOU haul it to your new town, and then you unload said shit into your new or gently used home. Our first mistake was thinking that we could squeeze all the crap we own into a 26-footer. Yeah. That’s the biggest fricking truck available, but I should have forseen that the smarmy bastard who rented us the thing was full of shit when he ever so smugly replied to my concerns, “So you have four couches, three beds, a washer and dryer, a refrigerator, two dining room tables, 20 chairs, and 2000 boxes. I still don’t see where your problem is.” Then when I mentioned the odds and ends and clothes and 10,000 framed pictures, he added, “You aren’t going to have any problem because the 26-footer fits a 4-bedroom house.” Well. Fuck him. What about the shit in the garage?

So after our possessions would NOT fit in the mammoth truck as I suspected, we had to go back and rent an additional 14-footer. Plus, we had to get two auto transports on which to place the cars we couldn’t drive. Locating and procuring the second truck took three hours out of our loading time because even though the smarm-master swore that there were plenty of smaller trucks available, we had to go to another town 20 miles away to get apparently the last motherfucking small moving van in the state of Georgia.

Finally, at close to 9 P.M. we had the vans full, and we needed to put my daughter’s car on the auto transport. Unfortunately, the instructions that make the hook-up look so easy that any consumer should be able to follow them are so full of horse shit that they could keep the entire South fertilized through 2020. Or the equipment was defective. I don’t know. All I DO know is that when my husband drove my daughter’s car onto the transport, the hitch sprang up from the ball causing the whole transport to fall and slide under the truck, at which point the transport buckled and severed the fucking fuel line on the car. 

Add to that the fact that now the only way to get the potentially explosive vehicle off the transport was to push it, and when we did, my husband fell off the transport and smashed his right elbow into the asphalt, resulting in the sudden appearance of murder-scene amounts of blood, and you can see why I can’t wait to move my own household shit again really soon.

Waiting for the tow truck to come pick up the car and the auto transport was so much fun! Around 2 A.M., we finally left the baking heat of the South.

Fast forward nineteen hours. All three drivers in the move-it-your-own-damned-idiot-self convoy almost fell asleep at the wheel various times, so we had to pull over and grab snatches of snooze; but we finally rolled into our new state at about 8 P.M.

It only took until 9 A.M. TWO DAYS LATER to unload the two trucks and return the first one before its 9:37 A.M. turn-in time to the local move-yourself-only-if-you-stopped-developing-at-the-brain-stem-in-utero store. Because renters are required to fill up the gas tank before returning the truck, and the truck’s turn radius is fucking negative something, the first truck got wedged onto one of those concrete and steel barriers that protect the gas pumps at a Marathon station. The tow truck for that debacle got there in a speedy 3 ½ hours. Oy.

Returning the second truck only took an hour and a half. Yay. But it should have been about ten minutes. The dealership where we were supposed to return the truck was approximately 2 miles from the house. Our turn-in time was 7:03 P.M. So when we arrived at the dealer at 5:10 P.M. to discover that the motherfuckers were CLOSED, we called the parent company, whose rep directed us to another dealer about 20 miles away that would be open until 7 P.M. We hauled ass over there…to discover that it was fucking CLOSED. If only I could have driven the goddamned van into the store’s showroom without civil and criminal penalties! Alas. I had to settle for slamming the door to the key dropbox really hard after I shoved the key into it with great force.

So. Yeah. It’s been a crazy ten days. But at least I am free of that horrid moving van, and I plan never to go near one ever again. As it is summer, A.K.A. the moving season, though, I keep seeing the damned vehicles every fucking where. I have to down a handful of those new mini-Reese’s cups, which are unwrapped for your convenience, just to calm myself down. I may have an extra-fat ass, but at least I am serene while I unpack these 2000 boxes of crap.