Thanks, dear MQD! Still up to my eyeballs in boxes. We are outta here on the 23rd of April. 😲
Sooooooo.. I shouldn’t have loose lips, sink ships, but the buyers postponed actual closing until April 3rd ish. He’s with the Navy, don’tcha know.. secret stuff an’ all that. Anyway, he had to leave for a few days.
Pray for his and his teams safety! Thank you!
Petey
Moving slide
When we relocated to our present house in 1999, we looked for movers in the Yellow Pages (remember them? LOL) and a seemingly decent company gave us the best estimate. The movers were Middle Eastern, but we didn’t think much about it, as many of the companies seemed to have Middle Eastern owners, so we thought moving was a specialty of theirs. (Ha! Live and learn.)
Anyway, the day of the move came, they did a quick and mostly professional job, BUT when we got to the new place, they held our stuff locked in the van outside, demanding that we pay them over a grand more than we’d already paid them! Gave us some bogus lame excuse that there’d been more work involved than they had anticipated. Utter BS. We had a signed contract, but they would not listen to us. They were basically holding all our belongings hostage, while they pissed and moaned about all this allegedly unforseen labor that had been involved in our move. We had packed everything ourselves, and both places were one-story residences, so this was a total pantload, and we all knew it. But they would not budge until we forked over the dough. We couldn’t call the cops, as this was before cellphones, and we didn’t know any of our new neighbors yet.
Finally, we just wanted this day to end, so we paid them the money they wanted. There was one American kid, a teenager, working with the crew, and he was acting all embarrassed and apologetic and stuff during the ordeal. I furtively slipped him a $20 tip before they left, when the others weren’t in earshot, and whispered to him that he should seriously look for a better job, with honest American employers.
If there was one consolation in all of this, it occurred a few months later, when a big news story broke, about a major bust involving multiple local Middle Eastern owned moving companies. It seems that this exact type of scam was their everyday M.O., and they finally all got rounded up and permanently put out of business. Just a bit too late for us!