Tell me reassuring stories of disastrous moves

[catmt]

We're moving this weekend. Our full service move fell through. Due to additional issues it's looking like we won't even be reimbursed for our self-move.


Sorry for the rant. Please let me know I'm not alone in my moving frustrations.

[audette]

We had one move where DH had to ask the packers to delay showing up because I ended up having emergency surgery the day before they were scheduled to show up...


Oh, and the reassuring part - they were able to delay a bit, my recovery was _stellar_, and we were able to clear housing without a hitch.

[Beeps (WOT?*)]

When we relocated from WA to Ohio, we rented a truck and car-hauler from Ryder several months in advance. The rental agency called to inform us their system crashed and they didn't have our information. We had to resubmit the reservation and payment info. So, essentially we paid twice for the truck and trailer.

The day before moving day - which happened to be Memorial Day weekend - we got a call from the company saying they didn't have a car-hauler for us; there was a problem with the braking systems on the car haulers and they had a limited number only and none for us. I was not happy since we'd reserved many months in advance and they'd already messed up our reservation once before. We "had to use their truck and rent a U-Haul trailer." U-Haul didn't agree with that because their trailers used different electrical than the Ryder ones (literally "a square plug into a round hole" - lol.) Then they insisted we could use a tow-dolly instead of a car-hauler; DH's car was too large for a dolly and we kept telling the idiot this. I spent half the day we were supposed to be cleaning, picking up the truck and finishing our packing on the phone with Ryder and U-Haul arguing cost, availability and semantics. The guy at Ryder *finally* checked his records and noted that no, our car would not fit on a dolly (and we didn't want to trail it through half the country anyway. We wanted a hauler.) We ended up going with U-Haul but it cost several hundred dollars more. We traveled across the country hauling the car behind the U-Haul and every time I saw a Ryder truck with a car-hauler I'd get pissed.

When we got to Ohio I had nothing better to do than find a job and bitch at Ryder, insisting they reimburse us the difference between what we should have been charged and what we had to pay. They offered the $6 difference in the trailer cost but wouldn't budge on the truck "because we could have used theirs and we chose to go with U-Haul." After multiple calls and a couple letters, I'd had enough. The tipping point was the customer service supervisor telling me "we didn't have a contract" and that is not something you tell me when I'm (a) sleeping with a lawyer and (b) right smack dab in the middle of my Contract Law class and able to recite "Offer, Acceptance, Consideration and Performance" up one side and down the other. I was like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman at that moment.

I sent a final one to the VP of customer service with a drop-dead date and monetary demand. The date passed and I found the phone number to the President of the company and gave him a call. I got a call back from the VP of customer service to handle my complaint who transferred me down to the supervisor-in-charge. She found my letter in some bin in a processing location somewhere, a week past the drop-dead date and three weeks after it had been received it still hadn't been looked at. She also had no record of multiple calls I'd made to them, though I had a log of the calls from my end. Oops again. When she asked if I'd received any sort of offer of compensation I told her about the $6 offer. She was apologetic and sent me a check for the difference in the charges for U-Haul vs. Ryder and a $100 coupon good for our next move (as long as we moved within a year. Yeah, right.)

I am a stubborn witch. It took me six months but I got my pound of flesh from them. I would have settled for half if they'd made the offer timely and in good faith. But they didn't, and so I didn't either. :devil

[Beeps (WOT?*)]

Story #2 is moving back to WA from Ohio.

DH left in October to start his new job. Before he left, his mom flew in from Florida and we packed up the house and got it show-ready. I stayed behind to sell the house and continue working. We figured it would take some time to sell the house and we'd discuss alternatives come spring if the house hadn't sold. It sold in two weeks and they wanted us out in two weeks; I got them to give me an additional week.

I was still working full time, taking care of my granddaughter (age 2 at the time) and my son had flown in from Washington over the summer to "move back" even though I'd told him we were moving to Washington. He spent the entire two weeks hanging out with his friends "he'd never see again" and ended up making arrangements to live with our neighbor, who was very good friends with our family.

The day of the move, the neighbor got in a fight with her husband and they split. Son was told it wasn't a good time for him to move in. So instead of packing and coming back with us, he spent the day trying to find another place to live (he was 18 and insisting he wasn't moving back to WA. He had a girlfriend in OH he didn't want to leave. Legally he was an adult so as long as he could find a place, it was his choice.)

The movers had packed and I needed to finish cleaning and loading our car but didn't know whether to load his stuff or not until about 9:30 that night when he and a friend announced he'd be moving in with friend. (I found out later they'd told his dad I'd left him behind and he had nowhere to go.) :eyeroll We loaded up the car with boxes of food, toys, toddler, suitcases, two cats, food and supplies and I got out of the driveway about 11:30 p.m., leaving a *huge* pile of furniture and stuff to be picked up by freeloaders or the trash service.

The trip out was uneventful the first night (it was only a few hours of driving due to the late hour, after all.) Second day the road was covered in remnants of an ice storm; my SUV skidded on a patch of ice and fishtailed, I regained some control when it hit another patch and I continued into a 180 and my front end hit the front end of the car behind me and one lane over...the superintendent of schools for Cedar Falls. sigh. His car went entirely across the median (which was the equivalent of about three lanes) and nose out into oncoming traffic. He ended up waiting in my car for a tow. The towtruck came, got us out of the median and we continued on.

I was supposed to meet a friend a couple hours past DesMoines but there was an accident that blocked traffic for hours in all directions. So I ended up staying at a Super8 behind the gas station where I was waiting it out. I was able to see her for a bit the following day, which was a lot of fun.

After visiting with my friend, I ended up driving through Iowa and into South Dakota (I think I hit a corner of North Dakota but don't quote me on that.) The weather was bordering on zero and it was after 2:00 a.m. before I found a hotel. It didn't take cats so I had to continue on and I found one about an hour later.

I drove through the next day with a storm warning on the radio. There was no sign of heavy overcast and in Wyoming they have storm gates if there is fear of whiteouts or major snowstorms. I made it all the way through Sheridan (on the Montana border) with no indication that the whiteout was going to get me; rumor had it shifting to behind me so I continued on. Just outside Sheridan and into Montana I got stuck in a whiteout so bad I couldn't see the wipers on my windshield. I spent the next I-don't-know-how-long driving down the road praying that I was on the right side and so was everyone else. "Please let the blue reflectors be right..." I pulled over and a guy in a pickup eventually pulled up beside me with a "hey, follow me." and sped off. I couldn't see him after less than a minute so I continued bravely, and stupidly, on to the next exit where I stopped with a bunch of 18-wheelers until the storm somewhat passed.

It cleared enough that trucks started pulling out, so I joined them. Another piece of the storm hit and I finally found an exit that had a hotel. But the hotel was horrific and dirty and filthy and I couldn't bring myself to stay there. The storm had abated and the road was cleared so I went on to the next town and found a Super-8 that accepted cats.

Woke up the next morning and loaded up the car, only to find I had a flat tire. Went to the local Ford dealership to have it fixed. Two hours later I'm still in the waiting room and the place appears deserted. Everyone had gone to lunch and my truck was still sitting on the lift, tire unrepaired with the cats inside. Kiddo and I walked through town, found a place to eat and headed back to see if the truck was done; it wasn't. Finally about 2:30 or so the truck was done, tire patched and we were on our way.

We made it through Billings, Bozeman and into Butte by nightfall. It was cold and the roads icy but I was hopeful to get through Montana by the end of the day. Stopped off at a KFC/A&W combo to buy a dog for the kiddo and chicken for me and ask about the condition of the pass. A couple people came in from the Missoula side talking about how slick the pass was and so I decided that, after everything else that had gone wrong, I was not going to continue through the windy pass at night in freezing, icy conditions. I pulled into the hotel next to the KFC and got a room. It was so cold that just in the time it took for us to order and eat the poor cats' water had frozen solid in the truck.

Woke up the next morning to front page news that it was a record-breaking cold snap and the weather, not accounting for wind chill, was 27 degrees BELOW ZERO. Yup. -27 degrees fahrenheit. I backed the truck to the door of the hotel so I could load directly, put the suitcases and then toddler and the cats into the car. It was so cold that even bundled she had trouble breathing in the short distance from door to car, and the cats meowed out and couldn't inhale. I got them in as fast as possible, loaded up and got out of there.

Drove through the pass, through Idaho and didn't bother stopping in Spokane, where I was supposed to visit with DH's aunt and uncle, because I wasn't going to spend another night elsewhere and traveling. I drove straight through from Butte to Seattle, arrived at our house at 7:00 p.m. and almost kissed the driveway as I fell out the driver's door.

* * * * *
What? This isn't reassuring? Well, take into consideration that I dealt with all that crap and still made it from Point A to Point B. And also there's no way your move could go any worse than this one did.

[ilovelamp]

I don't have one but wanted to say GL!

[catmt]

Jul 12, 2012 23:54:27 GMT -5 Beeps (WOT?*) said:

What? This isn't reassuring? Well, take into consideration that I dealt with all that crap and still made it from Point A to Point B. And also there's no way your move could go any worse than this one did.

Actually it is reassuring for all the reasons mentioned. Our drive will only be about 600 miles so that part will be the easiest portion of the move.

Thanks.