Moving Day, Part I

Recently, I had the joyful experience of moving my office. I am sure everyone has had this experience at some point. Running around trying to find boxes and packing tape. Packing boxes in-between trying to run your life which is now a bit of a mess as half your posessions are packed. Generally, moving is a bit chaotic. Despite my best effort, this experience ended up being a bumpy ride like all the rest. I never (ok, almost never) leave things until the last-minute, but this move came down to the wire. The move was necessary because the air conditioning in my original office did not work well, and, after being there for one rather warm summer (understatement), I was not up for another. I found, that there are many offices for lease but not as many that wanted Reni, the office dog, in the lease.

I did find a wonderful space, but by this time there was only a few weeks left before the move out date. This left me scrambling to find a moving company. I chose a large, well-known company, thinking they would be likely to handle the job well. I was a very small move as compared to many of the large office moves that they handle. What could possibly go wrong **How many times have you said that to yourself??** (It is like a really bad line from a horror movie… you must know what is coming!)

Things started out great. They arrived early, were pleasant and efficient. The load-out took about an hour. The only red flag for me was that I did not see them cover my yellow or beige office chairs with anything but I figured they were professionals and I pushed that little niggling feeling away. (You know the one…that itch in the back of your brain – you know something isn’t right but you just can’t quite put your finger on it.)

From there, all down hill.

• They couldn’t find my office and I sat for 40 minutes waiting for them to arrive.
• The load in was not at efficient as the load out. As they were loading in, furniture was damaged.
• As they were putting my desk set back together, furniture was damaged.
• As they did not know how to put my furniture back together, I had to wire and re-wire by computer, printer, etc. six different times.
• When they brought by beautiful chairs in, there were multiple black and brown stains on each piece from the furniture not being covered. (Always listen to your little niggling voice inside. When I asked them WHY they had not covered the furniture they stated that they did not have anything to cover it with. Hmmm… and why was THAT?)
• It took them until 2:00 – at which point I was informed that they simply could not put my furniture back together properly.

At this point, I was exhausted. I had not eaten since this morning as I was over-seeing what they were doing. I had planned to unpack the office that day and had hopes of having that done by 4:00 pm, but so far I couldn’t unpack a single thing. Not to mention – I had a full day of patients the following day and at this point, the office was not a place where I could see anyone.

*********STRESS************

Come back tomorrow to see how I handled all that stress and what happened with the move!

See you then! 🙂