Mike's Mover Musings
Just some musings... about moving.
I’m back at a moving company. As always with these types of jobs, the staff is a veritable Island of Misfit Toys. Most of the movers have been locked up (a number of them brag about how many years they’ve been in prison), or are currently on parole. A few have past addiction issues or have recently been in rehab. There’s me, the cancelled guy, and then finally one Ukrainian refugee. A motley crew of down-bad grunts.
It’s a nightmare, for reasons I won’t fully detail as of now because I’ve already done enough work-related carping. There’s a very obvious reason that these companies hire ex-cons and people with very limited options: they know the work is horrible, the conditions are awful, wage theft abounds, and they are doing illegal and deeply exploitative shit to employees. Some of that is particular to this business but some of it, I have learned from working several of these jobs, is prevalent no matter where you work. And as everyone is getting financially squeezed harder, both workers and bosses give less of a shit about what’s right. This is hopefully a temporary stopover and I believe I’m close to finding something else. In the meantime, it’s decent fodder for writing and I need to force myself to write more.
For now, I want to focus on a little positive-ish stuff. After all, there’s a reason I gravitated back to moving. Part of it is I have experience and wanted to leave the casino as soon as possible. One good thing about the wholesale lack of professionalism at a moving company is that you can show up and get hired on the spot, especially if you know how to do the job (and aren’t a total raging addict, although the junk company did hire one of those while I was there).
Indeed, I like a lot about moving, at least when conditions are reasonable, we have adequate supplies, and I’m paired with coworkers who aren’t total dicks and willing to pull their own weight. You get a decent workout, you get some good stories. God willing, you get some money.
Here are some stories from the last few months:
I was a little worried that work would keep me from watching when they moved the Steelers-Bills playoff game from Sunday to Monday due to a blizzard in Buffalo. It’s the slow season at the moving company and many days are distressingly short. Then again, you never truly know what you have in store until you arrive. They love to leave you in the dark like that. By the same token, anytime you actually are rooting for a short day, you can already guess what happens.
Sure enough, I arrived on Monday morning and they informed me I would be doing a move - in the snow - from Arlington, Virginia to Wilmington, Delaware. The immediate calculations in my head screamed OH FUCK.
Thankfully, while I’m usually a driver and crew leader, that day they assigned me as a crew member, meaning I wouldn’t have to log the five or so hours behind the wheel. I have YouTubeTV on my phone, so I could watch in the cab as we were hurtling down I-95 back to Virginia, provided we were done in time for kickoff.
The guy we moved was a little strange. He said he was moving to go work for a church in Wilmington, though he upgraded from a somewhat rundown garden apartment in Arlington to a pretty ritzy high-rise in downtown Wilmington. I guess those Delaware rents are a lot easier to take than Northern Virginia. He also kept changing his mind to throw away stuff in the middle of the job. At one point, I was carrying a side table I had wrapped in a moving blanket to the truck, feet away from placing it on the bed, when he told me, “You know what? Throw that out. The dumpster is back around the corner.” Sure thing, boss, just wish you told me before I wrapped it.
About 50 feet from where we were loading, there was a Latino dad and daughter playing in the snow. The mom peeked outside from an open ground floor window taking cell phone photos. It was a charming scene. I wrote ALF in the snow on the back window of a car. The idea of a person walking by and thinking, “Why did someone write ALF?” struck me as funny in the moment. Because he’s back, in snow form.
As soon as we loaded everything, we hopped in the cab ready to depart to Biden Country. My coworker Rodrigo calmly informed me as he started the engine, “I’m gonna play some Spanish music.” And he sure did. I don’t know enough about “Spanish music” to identify any genres or artists - music in general is somewhat of my cultural blind spot. I tried to stay off my phone to save some juice to watch the game on the ride back, so I mostly gazed out the window at the falling snow and vibed to the music. I hadn’t brought a charger because I didn’t anticipate being blindsided with a 12-hour day.
The building our customer moved into, while fancy within, did not have a proper loading dock, so we had to unload off a downtown street in the middle of the snow. Whatever, it was just a one-bedroom apartment worth of stuff. The customer had a ton of framed art and was sad to discover he had less wall space than he thought. “This is actually my first time ever in Delaware,” he said, which is a little weird since he said he had grown up not terribly far away in Sterling, Virginia. Happy to break your Delaware cherry for ya buddy, and I mentioned I had gone to some of those glorious Delaware beaches with my family as a kid. At one point, the customer tried to apologize for the weather and I shrugged, saying it could be worse and I’d moved people in the snow before (both true). He dropped a “that’s what she said” joke and Rodrigo and I pretended to be shocked. In my experience, affable church guys love “that’s what she said” jokes as their version of edgy humor. I told him about the time years ago, at a previous moving company, when I moved a sexton who was living in the basement of a church in Georgetown and that sexton had a pretty extensive porn collection among his stuff. “He had porn inside the church?” the customer asked, visibly vexed. You bet your sweet bippy he did. Oh, the stories I could tell you, Mr. Churchy.
He tipped us $40 each and we finished 15 minutes before kickoff. Fortune… kind of smiled upon me for once. I hadn’t mentioned it the whole move but I brought up I was excited the watch the game on the way home. The customer tried to give me hope the Steelers might win but I told him I knew they were screwed with T.J. Watt out. Rodrigo uttered “You’re a Steelers fan?” in a way that sounded disappointed, but I didn’t feel like getting into it when the game was about to start.
As you are likely aware, the Steelers got off to a disastrous start and fell behind 14-0 in the first quarter. I figured, most homerrifically, that they would right the ship enough to not get totally embarrassed and wanted to put in a live bet on one of the apps. We’re going out, but we ain’t going out like that! The problem: I didn’t realize Delaware, that den of corporate tax giveaways, apparently decided legalized gambling was still too uncouth for them. Luckily the truck passed over the Maryland state line right before the Bills kicked off again so I could hit that sweet, sweet +24.5 spread. TFW the geolocation hits.
Rodrigo tried to level with me about my doomed team as I sat there vaguely disgusted. “I was watching my team, in futbol, last week. I knew they would lose too, but fuck it.” Well said, my friend. Even though I told him I didn’t need to hear the announcers (Tony Romo calling a Josh Allen game is officially NSFW), he turned the “Spanish music” down a bit from what he had it on the trip north.
The Steelers made a decent game of it and covered that ridiculous spread, I reaped a spectacular bounty of four bucks and change, I shot a dirty look at M&T Bank Stadium as we rode through Baltimore, we didn’t capsize in the snow on the highway. All’s well that ends well, except the Steelers season, that is.
A young woman, probably late 20s or 30ish, led me and the Ukrainian guy up the stairs to the door of her second floor unit. Through the door greeting us in the living room was a life-size cutout of Michael Myers holding a knife from the Halloween movies. “Hey Michael Myers,” I said as if casually greeting an office acquaintance in the hallway.
She had several other framed pieces of Halloween memorabilia, including one poster signed by Jamie Lee Curtis. Big, big fan of the series, to be sure. I’m familiar with the type. I dated a girl for years who was a huge horror movie buff so you best believe I watched a bevy of slasher flicks in those days.
A little later, I was wrapping furniture pieces in her bedroom. She was gathering items from the closet, when she turned to me and asked, “Do you like your job?”
Now, nobody wants to hire movers only to have them show up and start bellyaching about their life. I chose my words carefully. “I like aspects of it,” I said. “You get to move around, see places you would never see otherwise. And people are usually pretty appreciative, it’s useful to them.” Even though selfish, braindead PMC feminists have twisted this term to complain about anyone asking literally anything of them at any time, my reaction here is actually what is meant by the term emotional labor.
“Oh, ‘cause people are always asking me that,” she said, just letting that statement hang there, so naturally I had to ask what she does for work.
“I’m a funeral director,” she said, with a y’know-no-big-whoop kinda tone.
I was at a loss and eventually offered, “Not all jobs are for everybody.”
For her new apartment, she purchased a doormat that said DEAD INSIDE. Girl is really feeling herself as Queen of the Netherworld.
Moving ain’t cheap, so we deal with a fair amount of clueless rich people. We met one at a storage facility to clear out his stuff. As soon as we introduced ourselves, he was already rabbiting on about not hurting the walls in his house. Oh word? You don’t want us to tear up your walls? If you say so…
Anyway, he spotted a sign at the storage facility that said no tailgating. “Do people really come here to tailgate?” he asked. I stopped for half a second to assess whether he was fucking with me.
“Not that kind of tailgating. They mean don’t try to follow cars closely through the gate, because it will probably close on your car.”
“Oooooh.”
I really had to hold it in until the customer left and I was alone with my coworker to comment THIS MOTHERFUCKER REALLY THOUGHT PEOPLE WERE LIKE HEY GRAB THE CORNHOLE BOARDS AND DA BEER BONG WE’RE GOING TAILGATING AT THE STORAGE FACILITY.
I had a customer named Ghislaine about six weeks ago. Look, I don’t know exactly how common that name is, I haven’t encountered it much out in the world, but I know it got ruined for however many people have it, at least for a while. After calling her by her full first name two or three times, she cut me off and said, “Just call me ‘Gee’”
I didn’t bring up Maxwell as I figured it would be a sore subject and likely the first joke everyone makes at her these days. Seems clear from the way she reacted. She had recently departed New York City and was complaining bitterly about how expensive it has gotten. The smartass in me wanted to remark when hasn’t NYC been expensive as all get-out. Post-pandemic and inflation, I know what was once stratospheric is now astronomical. Apparently she went to art school up there. Her storage unit had a ton of framed pieces. Judging by what was in there, she had a period of painting the Disney version of Alice into trippy paintings, a well-known genre.
We had to stop off at her parents’ place in Arlington to grab a couple more items. “I apologize that my mom is a hoarder,” she said, leading us into a cluttered basement. It was way too neat for an actual hoarder home, just a massive accumulation of stuff, but not in a particularly slovenly way. More of a it-stresses-me-out-to-be-in-here kind of way.
She moved to a place a block or two off Dupont Circle that is actually kind of reminiscent of NYC-style walk-ups. I said hey this place is kind of like New York and she said her friends had visited and said she found a bit of New York in DC. I figured if art hos are gonna gravitate to any part of DC, it would be that one. Nobody tell her Dupont hasn’t been the same since being gay went super mainstream.
One of the fellow grunts on staff is four years sober and good on him for that. We had a double stack - that’s our term for two moves in one day - had knocked out the first one quickly but the second couldn’t start early, giving us ample unpaid time to waste. We were near his place so we crashed there for a bit, and he played the new Spider-Man game on his PS5 (well la di da, some of us brokies still haven’t upgraded to the current generation of consoles). He also took the opportunity to pull out his AR-15 to show me that. He had already pulled out his hand gun to show me in the truck cab on a job site - not the first time I have had a mover coworker do that. Dude has a wife and a kid so I wasn’t especially worried he’d throw all that away to grease some rando coworker. He and another very pro-gun employee refuse to go into DC because of its gun laws. Whatever floats your boat, my man.
He resides in a sober house that dictates that any resident caught doing drugs or alcohol must vacate, both them and all their possessions, within 45 minutes. I get it, it’s a circumstance that demands strictness, though it would be funny if he called the moving company to see if we could speed run one of those situations.
Got called to some palatial home about a mile and a half from CIA headquarters. I assume everyone over that way is a spook. A rich lady had called us to disassemble and remove a weight machine and a treadmill from her basement gym. God I fucking hate treadmills, especially if I have to take them apart. Usually I can count on them being unused and covered in dust, but this one had a new wrinkle. She had been stowing her dogs in her basement gym and they had been peeing on the equipment, so this stuff was also coated in piss. Sweet!
At first, we couldn’t even get in touch with the customer on site. The housekeeper/nanny was trying to handle everything. I told the housekeeper I needed the actual customer to sign paperwork before we can start. The nanny also led us to a long hallway coming off the garage that had all these ridiculously heavy concrete pieces she said we needed to remove. Except there was nothing on the job form about this concrete, and the rolloff dumpster we were to deposit it in was already filled past the point that we couldn’t walk it in. I told the nanny I needed to speak to the actual customer about this. The nanny kept running interference and saying the woman was on a business call. Clearly trying to pull a fast one on us.
Their basement had a secret passage behind a bookshelf that the nanny took the child she had been watching while we were working. There was also a framed promotional jersey for The Sandlot signed by the all the kid actors from that movie. Wait, was The Sandlot a psyop? Is the deep state lying to me about how big junkyard dogs can get!?
Tips have been all over the place, though I’ve received six or seven $100 tips within a four-month span. Not bad. The most miraculous of those actually happened on a job where our truck broke down midway through the move.
We were moving a girl from one of those Navy Yard gentrifier condo canyon buildings to Alexandria. She mentioned, as we were readying to pull off from her old place, that her parents were there waiting for her at the new spot. I confirmed the new address, ready to pull off, aaaaaand the truck wouldn’t start. Battery died. All her possessions stuck there in the back. Good gravy.
I called management and they told me to ask around if anyone nearby had jumper cables and to ask for a jump. That’s a good summation of how useless and lazy they are. It’s not like we were five states away from the office. We were 20-25 minutes away. And we had been at the load not even two hours and hadn’t left the lights on or anything. If it was clearly our fault, then that’s one thing. Most of time, it doesn’t even seem like they check on the trucks. The inspection sticker on one of the ones they give me has been expired for over a year. I had to keep calling the customer to update her on the delay in the most sad sack way possible.
We were stranded there for two hours before we finally got management off their ass to call a tow truck to give us a jump. Obviously we didn’t charge the customer for that time and gave her a 10 percent discount on what we did charge her. At the unload, we had to keep the engine running the entire time to keep the battery from dying again so we could get back to the office.
The customers had no right to be that cool about it. The dad was cracking dirty jokes with us and they tipped us $100 each when they’d be fully justified in anger for wasting their time. Believe me, I’ve dealt with plenty of the opposite. There’s little more frustrating than when I have a job that is scheduled for, say, six hours that I knock out in three, essentially saving the customer like $400-$500, and they respond with a breezy “OMG you guys are soooo fast, you must never need to go to the gym, ok thanks byeeeeeeee” and no tip. That’s the kind of thing that will make you hate people. Like, my hard work saved you a bunch of money when I could have easily dragged ass in a way you wouldn’t notice and taken those hours on the clock, and I’m not suggesting you have to pay forward everything we saved you. A mere $20 tip each would be okay. Though I did have a lady a couple weeks ago tip me and one other guy a total of $7 ($3.50 each - that’s enough for a soda at a convenience store these days) and gave us that eye-rolling “oh it’s all the cash I have right now” excuse. Bitch, you knew you were hiring movers and had plenty of opportunity to hit up an ATM driving from your old place to your new one. If you’re gonna be cheap, be cheap. Don’t insult my intelligence on top of it. And don’t think I can make snide comments to customers about tips because you best believe they’ll immediately run to my bosses to complain about my bad attitude and ain’t no way the bosses will side with me. You just have to smile, take it in stride, and talk shit about them in the cab driving away.
Just goes to show every once in a lifetime a customer doesn’t suck.