Moving Sucks

Last updated on 2/1/2023

I hate moving.

It’s bad enough when you have to move your family and all your personal stuff from one house to another. Everything gets stuck in boxes and you can’t even make coffee for six months. You don’t know WHAT the neighbors are really like and you keep driving to the old house until someone breaks the news to your car.

But it’s even worse when your COMPANY moves. All that old @#$% that’s been laying around in the files since 1962 has to be either tossed or carefully packed and transferred to some new space that you don’t even know what it looks like yet. Every piece of it needs to pass the test – keep it or save it? Toss or pack? Somewhere there is a landfill overflowing with the tons of paper we shed this summer. Not to mention the psychic damage caused by resurrecting every single carefully buried failure of the last decade – OUCH!

And if you’re REALLY lucky, you get to help plan the move, a thankless task indeed. Sure, it’s a creative little puzzle to plan out offices and water coolers and where the copiers will go. Oh, while you’re at it, we could upgrade the network and shuffle a few workstations around. How’s about we install an ISDN line and get a web page while we’re at it? Those of you who work in small businesses know that when the purse strings open, you should NEVER SAY NO because you never know when they’ll slam shut again.

So you plan out all the whiz-bang new stuff that you’re gonna have at your cool new digs. THEN you find out all kinds of interesting (read: problems) stuff. You start hearing that so-and-so doesn’t want an office next to you-know-who. And there’s no water anywhere within 100 feet of where you need it and the electrician just doubled his estimate, and they can’t tile the floor in that harlequin pattern you wanted. We have to move two walls and WHY ISN’T MY OFFICE BIGGER?! Furthermore, your decorating committee, being composed of professional graphic designers, is UNBELIEVABLY PICKY about the color of the paint and wallpaper, and insists on having PURPLE chairs in the conference room.

Moving day. Stay on the job til midnight, like some kind of spastic traffic cop directing 25 sweating porters as they lug three truckfuls of filing cabinets and drawing boards and, uh… TIRE RIMS? up eight floors. There’s a lull between the time when all the stuff is hauled out of the old place and when it starts pouring into the new place, but damn does it pour in! I almost got walled into one room by 17 files.

I guess it’s worth it. The “new” building, only 90 years old, has a ton of charm – marble and brass and wrought iron everywhere. The old place was literally falling down around us – the roof leaked, plaster crashed through the ceiling, and we were almost the last tenants left. We have to get used to meeting other people in the halls again. It took two weeks to figure out how to use the phones, but almost everyone has a window now, and I have to take the decorating committee to lunch because they did a DAMN FINE job with the color scheme. As soon as I con the company into another modem, I’ll be able to check in here a little more often.

The really stupid thing about all this is… our new office is only HALF A BLOCK from the old one. I can literally look out my window and see the old place. When they finally tear it down, I’ll have a GREAT view of the Terminal Tower. Right now I have to settle for a parking lot. And I have to dig my way out from under the mountain of postponed crap that accumulated while all this was going on.