Last week was something.
Anyone familiar with Boston knows that the two-day window of Aug 31st-Sept 1st is a crazy shit show of shit where thousands of people and thousands of moving trucks play musical chairs within the streets.
There’s really no other way to express how much it stinks; especially if you’re someone who’s partaking in the shenanigans.
A day trip to Mordor is seemingly more delightful.
Lifting Heavy(ish) Things Prepares You for Life’s Dumpster Fires
Moving day is never fun.
I can think of a few things I’d rather do:
1️⃣ Jump into a shark’s mouth.
2️⃣ Wash my face with broken glass.
3️⃣ Talk about my feelings.
The list is endless.1
Last week marked the first time in almost five years my wife and I moved. It wasn’t something we wanted to do. Outside of a few annoyances we enjoyed the apartment complex where we lived. However, like many people during the height of the pandemic, we came to realize that living in cramped quarters in a cramped city wasn’t spectacular, so we decided in the spring to begin searching for a new, large(r) space to move to.
Thankfully we found a place less than a mile from where we lived and in the months from then to last week we planned our best (I.e., crossed our fingers a bunch) for everything to go swimmingly.
It didn’t.
I’ll spare you the nitty gritty details, but will just point out that the moving company we hired made a MAJOR gaff.
Okay, eff that, I’m going to tell you: We own a rather large couch. In fact, this couch was one of the first pieces of furniture we purchased together as a couple when we moved in together back in 2011.
There’s a history and a bit of sentimentality there.
We love our couch.
When our son, Julian, was born back in 2017, a week after bringing him home from the hospital we were privy to being handed a notification to vacate the premise within 60 days because the apartment complex we were living in at that time was going to be converted to condos.
When we moved from that place to the one we had just left, on the day of our move we packed our couch along with all of our other belongings in the moving truck only to realize that it wouldn’t fit in either the elevator or the stairwell of the new apartment complex.
Lisa ended up hiring a separate company to meet us at our old place so that they could literally take our couch apart, fold it up like a Transformer, haul it to our new apartment, un-fold it, and leave us in a state of astonishment at how fucking cool that was.
Anyway, this is all information I reiterated to the moving company I hired for our most recent move. They gave me a quote and I was like, “you’re certain that you can take our couch, right? We had to hire a separate company last time to do it because it won’t fit in the elevator or stairwell.”
“Yes, we dissemble and reassemble, we got this!”
To no one’s surprise who’s read thus far…
…no, they didn’t got this.
The movers who helped us that day were amazing; borderline superheroes. However, they took one look at our couch and were like “nope.”
Okay, they weren’t at all that callous, but did politely inform me that they couldn’t take apart that particular couch due to liability reasons.
This was unfortunate and news to me.
We had a hard window to stick to in terms of when we had vacate our apartment or otherwise forego our security deposit in addition to “inconvenience fees” if we decided to just leave our couch there.
I called the woman at the moving company who told me they’d be able to take care of everything and she owned up to the gaff. She offered a discount on services, however that didn’t solve the situation with the couch terms of getting it from the 13th floor to the moving truck.
Unless a wizard showed up, we were in a pickle.
And while neither of us had one on speed dial, thankfully, as a second resort, both myself and my wife have spent a fair portion of our adult lives lifting weights.
We ended up having to saw a portion of our couch off so that she and I could enjoy the bonding experience of finagling it down 13 floors ourselves to the moving truck waiting for us at ground level.
It was an unexpected chain of events, but we both looked at each other, said “fuck it, let’s do this,” and did it.
And pretty easily I might add.
Don’t get me wrong: It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t an insurmountable feat to pull off either. For a lot of couples, though, I feel like it would have been. For Lisa and I it was more like a somewhat challenging deadlift session.
I don’t write this under the guise that we should receive accolades or a ticker tape parade. (And I’m really trying to avoid coming across as one of those whiny white people that go out of their way to complain about 1st world problems like their local Whole Foods running out of kale)…😂
But I will point out that it’s random events like what happened last week which uniquely reminds me that lifting heavy things helps prepare everyone for life’s spontaneous dumpster fires.
