If you ask people to help you move…

1) Pack your shit up before we show up, we were asked to help you move, not to pack as well

2) Throw out your garbage and other useless crap, calenders from the year 2000 are useless for the year 2006 even if Miss HK is on the May picture, she probably wasn’t even that hot.

3) If you live in the old house and am going to live in the new house that all the stuff is being moved in, TAKE THE DAY OFF WORK AND HELP MOVE.

So this Saturday, one of my best pals asked me and some other friends to help him move his gf’s family’s house. I said no problem as he and his gf are good friends and they would do the same for me no questions asked. I woke up early Saturday morning since I had to drive my parents to the airport as they were flying out to Shanghai. I dropped my parents off and met up with them at the truck rental place to pick up the moving truck.

We get the truck back to the house where a few more friends were waiting to start moving. So we go into the house and we knew they had a lot of stuff, but we thought they threw out some stuff. Well it turns out the mother went back and dug out all the shit from the garbage and “packed” it. Their definition of “packed” will be described shortly but some more background information first. In this house, there are the parents, 3 daughters, and one of the daughter’s bfs. So theres 6 people in this house. We are friends with the oldest daughter, but come Saturday the 2 youngest daughters and the live-in bf GO TO WORK. Its FUCKING MOVING DAY and they can’t even take the day off to help move. My friend took 10 days off from work to pack all her stuff and to unpack stuff at the new house after the move. But these 3 ppl who live in the house can’t even take one day off to move their own stuff. Now anyone who has common sense knows that anytime a girl moves they have A LOT OF STUFF, there definition of “I don’t have a lot of stuff” is like 10 suitcases of clothes and another 15 crates of stuff plus all their furniture at the minimuim. So we got 3 girls worth of stuff plus their parents stuff and apparently this family hasn’t thrown anything since they arrived in Canada over 10 years ago, they have the original packaging materials and box for anything they have ever bought in Canada.  When I was in the back of the truck I was handed an empty BenQ keyboard box that “needed” to be moved.

But whatever, we start loading up the truck with load one, we move some boxes and bags into the back cuz they were stacked at the doorway and until we cleared that area we couldn’t get any of the furniture out. Now a lot of the bags was just paper and clothes stuffed into open ended shopping bags and boxes with no lids. When moving, its nice to pack stuff up in closed off containers so stuff doesn’t spill all over the place and get squished. So the guys are loading the truck, and the girls start moving through the house and notice none of the furniture has been taken apart and that the bedrooms haven’t really been packed at all. So we do our first load and the guys go to the new house to unload the truck, the girls stay at the house to pack up their stuff and dismantle their furniture. The family also said they had started moving some stuff over during the past 2 weeks. We pull up to the new house to unload the 1st load, we go inside and what did we find, 1 giant stuffed winnie the pooh and a giant stuffed white cow from the carnival and a 40 kg sack of rice. There was a few other items but those looked like the major items that were moved during the past two weeks – No further comment.

We unload the 1st truckload, grab some hotdogs and drinks for everyone and head back to the next house. We get back and one guy gets pissed off with the BS regarding the move and leaves, can’t blame him. Another guy did show up to help which was nice. Anyways the 2nd move took a bit to load as we had to dismantle all their furniture. The dad was trying to dismantle the furniture but we ended up doing most of it. I was dismantling this Ikea bed frame but when they put it together they stripped the screws when they screwed it into the frame so it was an utter bitch to get the screws out.

We started loading the 1st truckload @ 10:30am and we finished unloading the 3rd truckload @ 6:00 and there was still a pile of stuff at the old house but the group had had enough and we said they could figure it out. Some other highlights, we moved bags and boxes of garbage, one box that I moved was a giant tv box, but it wasn’t very heavy, so I opened it up since it wasn’t taped shut to see what was in it. Inside was another box so I opened that up, and lo behold guess what, there was another box. It was like those ukranian dolls that u open one and theres another one underneath and it goes on for like 5 layers or so. Well this giant box was the same thing, I opened down through about 5 empty boxes that all contained only air and another box, so we were like wtf, u want us to move this. The mom tells us there is stuff in the bottom somewhere so into the truck it went with the other boxes of paper and calenders. 

Anyways we unloaded the 3rd truck a couple ppl had to leave and I think the father wanted us to do another load but my friend was like, its 6pm, and all the furniture and most of the boxes were moved and that the family should be able to take care of the rest over the next week. The parents were treating dinner @ 7pm so I went with my friend back to his house before we met for dinner. The dinner was really good other than the fact it took 45 mins to get our food because there was some big dinner parties before us. At the dinner the 2 daughters and live in boyfriend were there and at the end they were like “thank you for helping”.  I don’t even know them and found it rather insulting. The parents and my friend it was cool as they were actually there during the move and the parents did their best during the day to speed up the move process for the day. But as for those 3 they couldn’t even take a day off to move their own stuff and I didn’t know any of them before that day. It was like I can sacrafice my Saturday to move your shit but you can’t take one day off to help in the process, not to mention they didn’t even pack half of their stuff beforehand. Its not like I’m an unemployed bum hanging around and got nothing better to do with my time. As annoying as it was to move boxes of garbage and having to help pack and dismantle the house, I can live with that even if I find it utterly stupid. But when someone thinks that I will do all their dirty work for a dinner that they didn’t even pay for and then come up to me and put on their friendly face and say “thanks for helping us move” thats just plain disrepectful to me. The dinner was nice and all but after the final cost I bet my portion of the bill didn’t even come to my rate for 1 hour of work at my non moving job. To be honest I really didn’t want to go for the dinner, I would have preferred to have just gone home, taken a shower and watched my beloved Oilers beat the Detroit Red Wings.

I’m not bitter or anything I just thought overall it was a rather stupid situation. So if you ever move and you ask your friends to move, please consider the 3 points at the top. Better yet if your a really good friend, hire professional movers.  If my friend and his gf asked me to help them move again I would still do it in a heartbeat since they are that good friends, its not like they could have controlled the moving situation either, they just tried to do their part, it just seems no one else in the family decided to do theirs.