A Few Small Repairs

Regular readers of this space will recall that my wife and I have just completed a relocation from Los Angeles to East Lansing, Michigan, where I am joining the doctoral program in the Management Department of the Broad College of Business. As part of the process, we hired packers to come and pack up most of our belongings, loaders to load everything onto a moving van (and then into a warehouse and back into another moving van), and movers to move everything across the 2,300 or so miles between our previous city and our current city. I’m happy to report that the packers did an excellent job, wrapping several things much more securely than their contract really required. The moving crew that delivered our things were also quite good, carrying on despite summer heat, attacks by bald-faced hornets (whose nest they had accidentally driven the truck into) and the fact that the City had decided that last week was the ideal week to sink an 11-foot deep hole into the street in front of our house, after removing all of the concrete and leaving us on a dirt road…

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the crew that loaded everything onto the trucks and into the warehouse. In the course of doing so, the somehow managed to smash one of our television sets, damage the piano, and lose our vacuum cleaner altogether. There were a few other losses, such as one of our photo boxes (smashed, but the pictures are intact) and one of the two supports for a trestle desk (without which the other trestle and the desk top are both useless as well), but none that I felt reflected the total lack of competence suggested by a television set wrapped in a blanket or two and then crushed between other items packed into the truck…

If it sounds like I’m being unkind here, well, I’m really not. There is such a thing as a television packing box, used to protect a television set that is being transported by truck, and the company we hired to pack and move our stuff does in fact sell them. I’m fairly sure that they billed us for a couple of them in the packing supplies, but I can’t prove it. In any case, they didn’t bother to USE ONE when packing up our TV. Fortunately it was our second set; the main one is set up in our family room and working just fine, and our smaller emergency backup set (actually a flat panel that we acquired here at the Meijer) is also working perfectly. Which does not make this any less idiotic…

And don’t even get me started about the piano. My wife tells me that the damage is to one of the legs, and should be easy to repair; she insists that the sound quality of the instrument will not be affected. Which is all very well and good, but considering how much money we shelled out to have the piano moved in the first place, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect it to show up undamaged. Or at least, without one of the casters broken off and the foot cracked…

Which brings me to the point of this rant (yes, I do have one!). Our sales representative is going to get the sort of telephone call we all hope we never get sometime this week, and he will then have the choice of taking care of some very unhappy customers, or facing the consequences. It’s a situation so bad that it normally takes bad language to describe it, but this one man has the chance (and presumably the power) to make it all go away. Let’s all hope he chooses wisely…

I’ll keep you posted.