Saturday could wait, but Sunday'd be too late

The sun has set on the 8th day of my move... and I'm still not fucking done. Yeah I know, I know, that's insane. Well, welcome to my world, folks. Cop a squat, and I'll tell you the story of my eternal move.

The vast majority of my worldly posessions have been packed into small, manageable boxes for a while now. I've been moving a few van-loads of those a day all last week. Enough to keep me on a timely departure schedule from my occasionally hawk-infested apartment, but not so much that my back said "Hey, knock it the fuck off, already!" I planned to be done with that in time to rent a U-Haul truck over the weekend and enlist the aid of a couple friends of mine to move all the big heavy stuff that I couldn't get on my own. A pretty simple plan, I think... but we all know what happens to the best laid plans of mice and hamms, don't we?

Early Saturday morning, like the crack of 8:30 or so, I go to meet my friends Phlegm, Chuckles, & J-Dub at work but it turns out Phlegm is already a no-show. His wife is pregnant and she wanted him to go get her pickles and grapefruit or some such shit... anyway, the rest of us saddled up and we headed over to the U-Haul place.
As we pulled into the lot, we noticed a lot of military surplus equipment, and an RV... (no idea if it was the EM-50) but no U-Haul trucks. What's more, the place was deserted - Lights out, nobody home. This, as they say, was not good. I tried the phone number on the door hoping for an answering machine message with an emergency number, but no dice. So rather than twiddle our thumbs staring at the old Jeeps and other Cold War remnants, Chuckles suggested we pop over to the large U-Haul center in nearby Pollostan, just 5 minutes away. Surely if anyone had a truck available, it would be them.

As soon as I hit the door of the Pollostan U-Haul place, I knew it was going to be bad. In retrospect, I should have just turned around and waited for another day to move my heavy stuff... but so far as I knew, this was the only day Chuckles and J-Dub had free to be my pack mules. There was one guy at the counter, whom I'll dub Counter-Guy (CG), and another guy milling about the back room, whom I'll dub the King of Queens... because that's exactly who he looked like. Being a busy Saturday in summer, the line strectched damn near to the door. Also, because it was all summery outside, and the hottest day of the month on record, the thermostat was set around 80.

CG spent literally 10 to 15 minutes dealing with each customer in front of me, regardless of the simplicity of their request. I can tell he was just trying to do his job, and help people out... but instead of running around the entire U-Hell store doing everything, can't any of that be delegated to the KoQ over there? Apparently not, because all His Highness was able to do was bumble about in the equipment room and emerge a while later to ask a couple dumbassed questions.

During the interminable wait, I scrolled through my Jon Heffron cellphone and a strange number popped up on the caller ID. It was the U-Haul place where I originally reserved my truck - they had called me on Thursday to confirm the reservation, and I didn't pay attention to their phone number at the time. But the confirmation phone number wasn't the same number posted on the outside of the Cold War U-Haul building.
I gave them a buzz, and it turns out that while, yes, these were the guys I had confirmed my reservation with, they weren't the ones who I had made it with. It seems Cold War U-Haul never had the 14' truck and appliance dolly I needed in stock to begin with, and just passed the reservation off to another place without telling me. Naturally, the other place didn't have a 14' truck either... in fact, they hadn't had one for OVER 5 YEARS. They did, however have a truck. It was fucking huge, and $40, but it had wheels and an engine, so I said "OK, where are you located?"
"Oh, we're just off of A-street near McKenna Boulevard."
None of those street names were familiar, especially for giving directions... so I asked him which exit I should take off the Interstate. "Exit 79 is closest, but if you take 77 it's easier to find us."
"Exit 79!?!" I almost yelled, "You're in fricking Commerceville!"
"Well... yeah. Is that a problem?"
"Considering that I'm in Hammistan, yes, I'd say it's pretty big problem. You're 25 miles away from me, guy. I'm not paying $40 for Bigfoot the Monster U-Haul truck, and 79 cents a mile to drive it here and back... not to mention gas. Sorry, guy."

90 minutes later, back at Pollostan U-Hell, I got to the front of the line, and quickly found out that they had no trucks available. The only reason I stayed in line is to see if they had the appliance dolly, I needed... of course they were fresh out. To CG's credit it didn't take more than a minute to deal with me and move on to the next guy... I'm almost shocked he didn't have KoQ rummage around back for an hour "just to make sure."

Anyway, with my immaculate plans all shot to hell, and time fast dwindling, the only thing we could think to do was steal borrow the van from work and doubleteam it with my own to haul as much stuff as we could in the limited amount of time we had left. We got one trip done before Chuckles had to return to work (turns out he was actually supposed to be working, but it was slow enough that he could leave for a couple hours. It's good to be the manager.) and J-Dub had to leave for Tulsa.

Chuckles and Phlegm came over today and we got 95% of it done, but we still need a truck of some sort to get my entertainment center out of there. So tomorrow rather than celebrating Independence Day properly by blowing shit up, I'll be limping into day 9 of my eternal move. Actually, I bought a flagpole mount for the house, so I'll start off by flying Old Glory in front of my home for the first time since I was a kid. That's kinda special all in itself.

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Previous posts from the De-Luxe apartment in the sky-hi-hi:
Moving is the Suck