After our somewhat disastrous move from NYC to Philly (the movers straight up didn't show), I was very diligent about researching potential movers this time around. I picked a company that had excellent ratings, and in the process of making the moving arrangements with them I was very impressed by their customer service. So I was pretty annoyed when they ended up sucking pretty much as bad as the last guys.
The first problem was that they didn't have an actual moving truck, they just had a big van. Meaning all our stuff couldn't fit in it, so we had to do multiple trips. This was a problem for two reasons: first, we were paying them by the hour and more trips means more money. Second, our new condo building has pretty strict rules about when you're allowed to move in - you have to be done by 4:30, or finish the next day. Since we scheduled our move for 10:00 am we didn't think we would come anywhere close to 4:30, but we ended up almost not making it. When I called the moving company's office to register my discontent, the guy said, "I don't know what you want me to do, that's the vehicle we have." I convinced him to send an extra guy to help speed things up, which he reluctantly agreed to do - after telling me it would cost an extra $15/hour.
The other, and I would argue bigger, problem is that I'm pretty sure the guys who showed up weren't actually movers. They were scrawny kids that looked like they had just been plucked from some college campus with an offer of free pizza (one of them was even wearing skinny jeans!), and obviously didn't really know how to move stuff. On multiple occasions I had to direct them on how to fit stuff through doorways/onto elevators, after they claimed they couldn't do it (despite the fact that everything on our apartment was moved in there three months ago by us, and in fact did not magically appear there after bypassing the elevator and door).
They were also just incredibly slow; it took them two and a half hours just to load the van the first time. Part of this was because they kept taking breaks to smoke, talk on their cell phones, etc... I finally got so frustrated that I started moving stuff, and I think I ended up moving more than they did. I think my favorite moment from the whole move, and the one that sums it up the best, was when all three guys went in the elevator with a load of stuff (don't ask me why it took three of them to go in the elevator), and during the time they were gone I single-handedly moved the entire rest of the contents of our apartment (which was not a trivial amount of stuff at that point) to the area by the elevator. When they finally came back up and saw me waiting there with all our stuff, they said, "wow, you're fast!"
My other favorite moment was when I saw one of them awkwardly struggling to carry a table we have that has casters on it. I told him it had wheels and he could push it, and he said, "Um, not anymore" and produced one of the wheels from his pocket. That thing's casters were drilled into it; I have no idea how he managed to rip one off - I'm almost impressed. Almost.
The whole time this mess was unfolding, I was mentally fuming but forcing myself to stay calm because I didn't want to piss them off when they were in the middle of holding all our earthly possessions. I was also steeling myself for the mighty conflict I envisioned happening at the end of the move, when I would refuse to pay them full price. So I was quite delighted when their own incompetence took care of the payment issue for me - I guess the office guy didn't pass the memo on to the moving guys that they were supposed to up the hourly rate because of the third person, so they didn't. They also displayed a spectacular inability to do math, and flat out incorrectly multiplied the hours by the rate. So they ended up charging me the amount that I was planning on paying them initially, which I was happy to pay without argument!
The whole thing ended up taking six full hours, which is pretty ridiculous compared to the seven hours it took us to move here from NYC (once we found real movers to show up). We haven't acquired any new possessions in the three months in between moves so we were moving literally the exact same set of objects, but it took basically the same amount of time for these guys to go 30 blocks as it did for real movers to go 110 miles. Amazing.
No comments:
Post a Comment