Moving Day

We did the Sydney move this weekend and it was a bit hilarious. Not Chicago-union-hilarious, but still along the lines of “you gotta laugh, otherwise you’ll cry…”

First of all the movers were late, but claimed they couldn’t call us for lack of phone reception (which is also why they didn’t respond to our calls). So they arrive, and they’ve brought a crew of about 12 people to do a 3-floor, 330-person move. HAH. Supposedly they were scheduled to bring 15, but then 3 guys never showed up…and they couldn’t manage to replace them. (Actually, I heard from one of the movers that at least 3 of the 12 that did show up were already last-minute replacements for no-shows…how’s that for awesome personnel management. Ugh.)

THEN it turns out that the freight elevator, ahem, “goods lift” has been double-booked; we booked it with one building manager, and then another building manager booked it for another company overlapping the same time. They apparently don’t have any sort of central reservation system…seriously. I’m like “Hello, can I introduce you to this free product called Google Calendar?” 

In addition, there’s another company moving out on this same day! So the building had rigged up another elevator as a faux-freight elevator, but they wouldn’t let us use it until the other company’s reservation ended. So there were TWO freight-like elevators…but we couldn’t use either until after 2pm. ON OUR PRE-ARRANGED MOVE DAY. Oy!

So I went down to the basement/loading dock level, and it turns out that the construction company that has the real goods lift booked isn’t even using it that much. So I hit the button to call the goods lift, and then ask the elevator operator to take me up to 18 (one of our floors). He does, with no complaint. Once we’re up there, I get the movers to load in one elevator’s worth of stuff and take them back down. In the meantime, I go down the passenger elevator and then the parking garage elevator to get back to the loading dock…and use the button to call the freight elevator again. I made about 5 loops (with the movers getting another load down each time) without running into anyone from the construction crew before my co-worker Janine was able to negotiate a lift-sharing arrangement with the building manager over the phone. Take THAT, stupid building management and their lack of a reservation system. 

Oh, and of course — it started raining. I mean, it would have to be raining on a move like this, right???

So, even with me and Janine doing some of the actual physical moving (12 guys is really NOT enough to move 300+ people in one day) it took a whole day longer than it was supposed to. WHEW. But it was worth it, the office looks great! (If you want to see photos, email deb directly.)