The Worst, Funniest Day of My Life

Diverting from my usual herpderps, I'm going to tell a little story about the worst moving experience I have ever had in my many years of moving from house to house, city to city. I have had some bad moving experiences, but this one takes the cake. Fortunately, it was SO bad, so unbelievably and unlucky, that it managed to push past the point of awfulness into the realm of hysterics and hilarity. I just didn't realize it at the time. My friend, brother, and fellow blogger has already posted his perspective of the ordeal (I moved in with him and his girlfriend) over at Duke's Buzz (check the sidebar, I haven't read it yet so as to make sure I'm not ripping him off), so allow me to share mine.

And so we begin.

A compadre of mine, Ean, had come up the night before to help me move stuff from my room in the basement to the main floor of my apartment so that we could load it into the truck right off the get go in the morning. Everything was ready to go, we were fired up, plans had been made and things were going to go just swimmingly. We watched Date Night and Being John Malkovich, had a few philosophical discussions and called it a night, not even slightly expecting the shitstorm that awaited us.

The plan was that a friend of Duke's was to go meet them at their apartment at 8AM, go pick up the truck, get to my place no later than 9AM, load up, get back to Duke's, load up there, unload at the new place, and finally laugh, eat pizza and drink beer.

This is not what happened.

8AM and still no word from our truck driver. This is because Rogers had decided to cut the phone earlier than agreed upon, so the driver couldn't call up to the apartment to get buzzed in. It seems the day has already begun in a tizzy. So Duke's gf heads downstairs to see if she can get access to the internet or something to try and contact him (I'm not sure of exact circumstances, as I was not with them yet), and there he was, trying to figure out what to do. Well the answer is now to go get the truck. Quickly. Another of their friends goes off to my place to help get ready, and the rest go to get the truck.

This turns out to be problematic since the good people at the rental place have decided that they didn't feel like having the truck ready at the agreed time. By the way, we aren't late by our own standards. We have the service elevator reserved from 10 until noon, so we really needed to mosey.

Meanwhile, my friend, former flatmate, the dude from Duke's, and myself decide to pack the more delicate things (computer, guitar, etc.) into his car so as to not be rocked around in a potentially jostling moving truck. After that, we wait. They finally show up at about 9 30AM and we are ready to load up as fast as humanly possible. Except that the construction on my street now has the curb blocked off almost completely, so they have to go around the corner, and we have to haul all my stuff, including a sofa, massive CRT television, and computer desk so dilapidated it's only held together by hope, half way down the block and around the corner. Bummer. However, it gets done, I say goodbye to my old roomies, and we're on our not-so-merry way.

At that point, it was a little after 10AM. Our elevator time has started, and we have to drive through downtown Toronto to get to the next destination. Once we get there, we realize we have barely over an hour left to move an entire two bedroom apartment. Tensions are mounting and we begin to feel a little pain in our arms and legs but we are strong, moving as quickly as possible (sometimes I moved a little less quickly than the others, as I am young and able-bodied but also an asthmatic ex-smoker) to get all our shit downstairs before our time runs out. Unfortunately, we fail in that endeavor, but the people who were supposed to use the elevator after us were very kind and understanding, and let us continue without raising much of a fuss. At one point, I believe we were moving their stuff up then filling the elevator with our stuff on the way down.

The truck is finally loaded by 1 45PM. Our reserved elevator time at the new place is from 1 - 2 30PM. We are realizing just how boned we seemed to be, but not even close to realizing how boned we were about to become.

Since we had packed my stuff into the car, we couldn't quite get all of the rest of the delicate stuff into it, so Duke, Ean and myself grabbed a few bags of stuff that probably wasn't very heavy but definitely seemed like it at the time, and walked over to the new place. We are all very near death at this point. Duke has barely eaten and is feeling faint, and we are all broken husks of human beings.

Once arriving at the shiny new place, it became apparent that there was no back entrance to park a gigantic moving truck and unload. Rather, they preferred that we parked it right in front of the main doors and unloaded there. The problem being that the driveway for said entrance is a tiny, one-car width, half circle.

After hitting a guardpost, we figure out just how we're going to get this truck in. That's when we took out the side of an SUV (miraculously, the truck suffered no damage, but the same could not be said for the SUV it had just clobbered). After I was finished having a little panic attack and Duke had eaten something, we decided to proceed as planned while keeping a lookout for the driver of the vehicle we had damaged in order to explain the situation. Honesty and all that. Of course, it didn't go over well, but it went over even less well than expected. I could tell straight away when I saw the driver. A lovely young lady, clad in expensive looking clothes with a chin that didn't seem to move down past a 90 degree angle from her neck.

After a while of information exchanges and attempted diffusion, the lady seemed less interested with getting compensation for the damages, and more from whom it came from. At least, that's the gist of what I got out of it; I was involved very little in the argument. In any case, rather than accept compensation from whom I guess she thought was the inappropriate person, she decided that the best, most rational solution to the issue was to call the police.

The cop that showed up was very reasonable, but since he had to lay a charge, he issued a comparatively small charge on the driver and we were all free to get things moving again.
Miraculously, we had everything in the new place just before the sun had gone down. We all took off our shoes, ordered pizza, cracked a few beers and let out a great sigh of relief.

Then the fire alarm went off.

Beginning to realize how unlikely horrible our luck had been so far, things began to seem less shitty and more funny to me. It was just silly at this point. Hilarious. We all congregated outside, said hello to our new neighbours, and waited for the fire trucks. Once the firefighters had shown up, we saw them being led down by two people who seemed to know the cause of the alarm. I thought I recognized one of them and took a good look (it was dark now).

It was SUV lady. She likely a neighbour of ours.

At this point I begin to laugh, as we hear more sirens, likely the police showing up just to make sure they aren't needed. One lone cruiser pulls up to the building, and who should it be but the same cop that settled our earlier dispute.

We were stuck in an episode of a sadistic sit-com. I erupted in laughter stomping my feet on the ground like a giddy child, many of us did.

Life certainly is stranger than fiction.