Here in Tacoma, spring is in the air. It smells exactly like winter (pulp mill and dog poop), but with the imminent threat of moving day. Also, jobless day. Employment is your problem—but moving? Crafty Connie is here to help. Moving day is dreaded far and wide by anyone who has ever participated. The domestic sphere, unsurprisingly, is hard to fit through doorways.
The most effective way to move your things, however, is not by picking them up yourself. The most effective way to move your things is to get others to do it for you. This is where the true difficulties of moving day reveal themselves.
First and foremost, moving things requires a pickup truck. This is irrelevant to the spatial considerations of the move: distance traveled, dimensions and weight of stuff being moved, etc. The real reason for finding a pickup truck is finding a pickup truck owner. Find a pickup truck owner, and your moving difficulties are well on their way to being solved. Truck owners have a reputation to uphold: rugged, capable, physically fit, breedable, able to conquer any task. These traits also apply to horses, strangely enough. But I digress. Truck owners, as a breed, know these things. They know that they have put their ego on the curb to be looked at and maybe even stroked. Touch it. Yep, furry. Don’t stop. They spook easily.
Truck owners also know that they have built a set of expectations for themselves by driving something that would require tugboats to dock if it floated. Once you have found said pickup truck owner, rope ‘em in. They are easily confused by distractions, like beer and the carrot of social acceptance. Defer the reward in order to keep them interested in the task at hand. The horse gets fed at the barn, and a horse that learns otherwise will never bear their burden effectively. Wow, how did we get to talking about horses again?
If in the unlikely event you fail to corral a truck owner or another person with sufficient ego gap, begin recruiting friends. By friends, I mean people who care enough about you to help without actually hating you afterwards, or people who you don’t care if they hate you afterwards.
Consider also your feelings towards these people. If they might drop one of your belongings which is worth more to you than their life, consider A) whether you want their help; B) where you might hide the body when they butterfinger that stereo system down the brick steps.
A key to a good move is proper supervision of the people moving your things. Make sure you are watching their every action at all times. Keep up a verbal play-by-play of their proximity to nearby objects and their likelihood of dropping the object at any moment. Use stern reprimands for gouging the sheetrock or for putting things down to rest. This makes for a better experience for your stuff. Don’t get distracted and attempt to lift things yourself. This quickly descends into chaos, and has a disturbing resemblance to actual work. You run the risk of sweating, straining your back, pinching your fingers—dangers best avoided.
If you find you have too much stuff to move to a new, you may chose to hold a moving sale. To ensure success, put ads on Craigslist to advertise. This guarantees that you will waste your time answering spam e-mails, e-mails from people who just want to trade their useless crap for your useless crap and people who will never, ever show up to collect the $10 bedside table they called three times about. The ones who do show up will bargain you down to $5 and the rights to your firstborn child. If this strategy fails, consider a more last-minute strategy: the moving gift.
Moving gifts are items which you generously decide to bequeath on the future inhabitants of the space you are vacating. Who wouldn’t want to become the proud owner of a broken roomba,moldy textbooks and a couch that is inhabited by enough creatures to almost move itself, if only they could form some central organizing committee? Moving gifts not only help you move places, they help others move places. To tears, for example.
If you cannot bear to part from your possessions but didn’t have the logistical foresight to figure out how to move them before your lease ran out, you may to try to attempt the rarely achieved but gutsy “moving loan.” The moving loan is similar to a moving gift, except that you intend to reclaim your items some months (or years) later. The important thing here is pretending to simply be giving the items away and then returning when the new tenants aren’t around to reclaim your stuff. It’s still yours, after all.