My housemate Emily moved to the other side of Melbourne on Sunday and as I’m going to rent a room from her for one more week I ended up moving with her. While moving is always a somewhat chaotic process, this was easily the worst moving experience I have ever had.
Emily had one of her friends come over for the night to help with the packing and by Sunday afternoon we finally had most of the stuff stored in boxes and bags. I was actually fairly impressed at this point, on Saturday it was still looking like we could never get everything packed in time. Unfortunately, this was probably the last thing of the day that went well.
The moving company’s truck was supposed to arrive around 2 pm but instead they showed up around an hour late. And they had only one smallish truck instead of the truck and a van as promised. The guys handling the moving were also far from impressive. It was just a pair of small and very young boys with broken English. They seemed to struggle with anything even remotely heavy, at least Emily’s choice of instrument is a guitar, not a piano, otherwise we may have never finished…
Even so, the two girls and I ended up carrying most of the stuff and the moving company guys focused on packing the truck in a very disorganized fashion. It was no real surprise that we couldn’t fit everything in the truck despite the earlier promises to the contrary from the moving company. In the end, Emily had to call her parents for help and they had to drive to Melbourne all the way from Ballarat (around 120 km trip) with their trailer. At least with the trailer and three separate cars we could finally fit in most of the stuff but we still had to leave some of the least valuable stuff like potted plants behind for another day, it was getting too late for multiple trips anyway.
The whole process from the arrival of the moving truck to getting everything out of the truck in the destination took a total of five hours. We all thought this was a completely ridiculous considering the pretty short distance and the relatively small amount of stuff involved. After the day it was very clear that the guys the company had sent us were in no way up for the job. And obviously they were charging Emily by the hour, too!
Luckily almost all the stuff we were moving was Emily’s and I didn’t have to get personally involved. I wouldn’t have been nearly as polite as Emily when getting screwed over like that. At least the whole ordeal is now behind us and I’m looking forward to some busy (and hopefully less annoying) times. At the moment we have some shore dives planned for Wednesday, a diving trip to Phillip Island during the weekend and early next week I’m off to Sydney for a few weeks!