One day, I hope to be wealthy enough to pay people to open boxes that are shipped to me.

Such was my Saturday morning. After arriving at Georgetown University for a 9 a.m. job that had, unbeknowst to me, been canceled a week prior, I got a perfunctory apologize from the company owner and a more forceful order to move on to the next job, which entailed removing paintings and sculptures from boxes and swimming in packing peanuts.

The truck arrived at the Tenleytown home of a 50ish Jewish woman shortly thereafter. I was with Tyler, one of the high school kids the owner saw fit to bring on for the summer. They’re nice enough guys, the kidlets, but they’re obviously smaller and can’t be trusted with the heaviest stuff we move. Tyler had to sub out on a sleeper sofa carry on one of his first jobs. Not a great precedent to set. Not that it mattered on this particular job, what with the heftiest object weighing maybe 30 lbs. Plus, Tyler told me an amusing story about how a bunch of thugs from his school crashed a house party hosted by a student at a nearby private school. I don’t remember all the particulars of the brawl, but at one point, a private school kid repaired to the restroom to clean the blood off his face, only for one of the thuggish types to follow him in there and continue the beating. Apparently, the guy held him up by the shirt so the kid wouldn’t fall over as he kept wailing on him.

Getting away from the point, which is more about how shitty this job was. The woman shows us her stack of boxes that just arrived. Sadly, they contained not only art, but packing peanuts and she would prefer keep those things out of her impeccable living room. So Tyler and I had to carry all the boxes over into her muggy as shit screened-in patio area, where we made a giant mess while carefully opening her many boxes with pocket knives. We’d uncover something within the great peanut jumble and then unwrap so it could be added to the decor. One of the items was a bronze bust that the woman already had one copy of. She made me stand there for about three minutes while she eyeballed the two busts so as to determine whether they were, in fact, identical. She finally concluded that they were, so the new one would have to be re-wrapped and packed back into a box. Lovely.

We then had to spend 30 minutes sweeping up all the packing peanuts because not being in the living room doesn’t mean they aren’t contributing to a mess. For whatever reason, an arrangement was made with the owner for us to take all her trash with us in the truck, yet not charge the requisite $75 dump fee for when customers try to palm their garbage off on us. Having a boss as a pushover is a double-edged sword, I suppose.

There was also no tip, of course, even though I also agreed to move a dresser from the basement to the top floor of the house. The woman had a very Jewy name, which prompted Tyler to call no tip before the job even began. I tried to disabuse him of that stereotype. For good reason - Jews aren’t terrible tippers. They’re actually pretty decent. It’s the Indians who are horrible. Who don’t tip. Who try to haggle every bill. Who fight you on every detail. Who add shitloads of items at the last minute and wonder why jobs go longer than expected. Who have checklists of their stuff that they must waste time with at the end to make sure everything is accounted for. Yeah, this job is basically making me racist against Indians. Or fortifying already existing racism. Anyway, like I said, this woman didn’t tip and I ended up feeling foolish for sticking up for the Jews. That’ll learn me.

Lots of moves have transpired since I last updated. Most of them were unexceptional. A few of them had memorable fuck-ups or funny-duh-duh things happen, but I was too lazy at the end of the day to chronicle them here. Then there were the days where the heat index was above 110 degrees and I was otherwise occupied with being grateful to not to have succumb to heat stroke.

Also, I moved a woman who owned a metal mer-horse that hung from the ceiling in her kitchen. When we asked why this mer-horse was significant to her, the woman replied, “My husband got it for me and, in a lot of ways, it makes sense for us.”

When you’re really tired and dehydrated, you’ll accept answers like that without further explanation.

Lately, I’ve started running jobs. This means driving the truck around and being responsible for packing. If stuff breaks, it’s on me. If the truck happens to take out a crowd of schoolchildren strolling through the Mall, I’ll be the one high-tailing it for the border. It’s a role that the owner pushed on me for a little while, but I resisted until recently. Partly because I’m lazy and like being able to read in the truck while driving between destinations. A desire on my part to be detached from the job was likely a factor, too. Being a crew member means I can just mindlessly follow orders to pick things up and stick them in the truck, according to the behest and desire of whoever is running the job. It allowed my mind to wander and to not focus on what I’m doing for a living at the moment.

Eventually, I decided I had spent enough time ducking an opportunity to conquer a new challenge, as well as not taking advantage of a nice bump in pay. So I’m being eased into the role now. Most of the jobs have been fairly easy and driving the truck hasn’t been quite as daunting as I initially thought. So all’s well with that, at least until I get ambushed on a job where the customer has three refrigerators, two grand pianos and a half dozen ellipticals.

——-

Customers always want to know about our biggest moving nightmares. Maybe they just want to be assured that their move isn’t so bad and, no, they don’t own an obscene amount of stuff, a total that can do nothing but clearly and undoubtedly implicate them in the debauched and disastrous materialism that will one day bring low the age of man. Maybe they just have a morbid sense of curiosity. Either way, customers eat that shit up.

Well, one such nightmare, maybe one of the worst we’ve experienced, happened late last week on an apartment move in Silver Spring. We showed up with three guys to move a woman maybe 10 minutes away. As is our usual procedure, we started stacking boxes on the dollies to get them onto the truck first. It was still mid-morning, so I didn’t look at the boxes all that closely, so it caught me by surprise when three or four roaches crawled out of each one of them. I recoiled, mostly ‘cause that shit is gross.

Once we brought the first load of boxes to the truck, we let the crew leader see all these lovely critters skittering through this woman’s stuff. He freaked. We all figured we were gonna walk away from this job. I’ve yet to be on a job where that happens, but it does on occasion. Either a customer misrepresents what they have so terribly that we risk a one-star Yelp review - tantamount to exploding the truck to the company’s owner - and just leave, so something is so rank that it’s in our best interest to not even bother. We were justified to leave anyway. You can’t load roach-infested stuff in the truck. They’ll lay eggs in the blanket and then you risk giving roaches to anyone else you move in the vehicle.

The crew leader got on the phone with our company’s owner. It was obviously he wanted to just take the woman’s boxes back to her apartment and take off. But it was obvious that without even hearing the full exchange that the owner wanted him to soldier on through it. So the crew leader went up to explain to the woman that we’d scan through her stuff and move the things without roaches. That eliminated all of her boxes and a lot of pieces of furniture as well. We picked up her couch and roaches popped out of it. Woop. Sorry. That stays.

It gives me great sadness to report that this woman is a member of #TeamCat. Her place, despite the splotches on the carpet, wasn’t the dirtiest I’d seen. And you’d think the two cats living there would have tried to do something about the bugs. Nope. Roaches for days. And since this woman, a somewhat emaciated 40-something with a dyed wan red lady mullet, lived on the fifth floor of this building, it is safe to assume roaches exist elsewhere in the complex. Someone would surely have tried to clear them out at some point.

The customer did a decent job feigning surprise that bugs were marching in formation out of her stuff. Given that she owned five amps and moved into a place with a bunch of kooky art pieces, it’s obvious that she’s the left brained impractical creative type. One so consumed by her craft, whatever it may be, that she can’t keep up basic cleanliness. That or she’s on drugs. Heavy-ass drugs.

Anyway, we knocked out the move quickly, especially because she only went 10 minutes away. Not to mention because we only took the half of her stuff that didn’t belong with Vincent D’Onofrio’s character from Men In Black. To our immense shock, we tipped us $50 each. The gaunt, roach-infested starving artist type didn’t seem like one who would pony up come tip time, but if the last year has proved anything, it’s that I don’t really have much of a clue how the world works.

Scraped up my knees pretty good on a job on Saturday. Was walking off the ramp with a couple book boxes on a delivery in Glover Park when my foot caught the handle on the end. I twisted my ankle trying to get free, but ultimately went down anyway. Like a good committed mover I still kept the boxes from hitting the pavement, which meant my knees were breaking my fall.

As it happens, the customer was there to see me go down. Always good to injure yourself to engender a small amount of sympathy. It was a good amount of blood but not enough that I was dripping all over her shit. This on a job estimated at four hours that we knocked out in two and a half.

Nevertheless, she tipped the three of us all of $20 total. In a check, which means it gets taxed. So deduct another dollar or so each right there. So that leaves just enough to buy me a box of bandages.

Grueling 10-hour work day moving out of two townhouses. The second couple had barely even bothered to pack. All their clothes were still in their dressers. All their kids’ toys were stuffed in the chests. The only box that was ready was a wardrobe sized box containing the contents of the couple’s kitchen. It easily weighed more than 200 pounds. The husband sat around drinking beers are we lugged stuff. His only interaction with us came in the form of unconvincing sympathy over how heavy certain appeared and laughs if we stumbled.

But then the ice cream man showed up in the suburban townhouse development. It didn’t entirely save the day, but it preserved eating Batman’s ice cream face as the lone detail that I will hold in my memory.

Perpetrator of blog neglect that I am, I should be more contrite. Then again, I made no promises of regular content when I started this project. Moreover, the fact that there are fewer than five potential readers renders the consequences even less dire.

Save for being abruptly called up to do a Sunday job when there was a no-show on a three-man job, it’s been a steady diet of two- or three-day workweeks, interspersed with contributing to KSK and applying to panoply of shitty office jobs in which I have at best nominal interest.

I had two interviews last week. One was a phone interview with a progressive news non-profit. I’d be their media manager, which basically the person who handles social media outlets and flacks to relevant mainstream media members about crediting the association when appropriate and also making sure key agenda points are receiving coverage. In other words, deathhhhh. Still, gotta chase that steady paycheck.

The second was with a writing placement organization. The interviewer couldn’t have sneered more at my recent background in sports. “It could be a while before we place you on a job. Your sports background doesn’t gibe well with our usual concentration, which is typically trade writing and the sort.” Yeah, I get it. I had a fun job and now I have to engage typical D.C.-type shit that no one wants to do.

But whichever of those I end up settling for is a matter I’ll still have to wait a few weeks to emotionally deal with. For now, it’s still the moving grind. I know it won’t be long before I’ll have to end doing it. I’m sure I’ll miss the opportunity to have regular physical exertion without going to the gym. 

But enough grunt habits have materialized that I won’t be all that devastated when the moving does come to an end. For a low-key job, there’s still quite a but of posturing, most of which is even more pointless than usual workplace ego-stoking. There are a few movers I enjoy working with, but more than a few of them take pride in showing others up. Guys feel the need to snatch something out of your hands that you’re carrying, for no other reason than to make you look bad. It took me a little while to identify the worst of these. Now that I have, it’s been a struggle to guard against it without being abrasive.

David is seen to be the worst offender on this score. A 50-year-old guy who has claimed that he came to moving because he tired of the enervating grind of white-collar jobs. Others at the company more concerned with the veracity of his tales say there are some inconsistencies. Apparently, he’s living with his mom, less out of necessity to take care of her than he professes. He wants to be a crew leader. But a crew leader requires an unrestricted driver’s license. And word has it he’s got a few DUIs to his name and a blower on his car ignition. I don’t really give a shit either way. I’m made indifferent by the knowledge that this won’t be a long-term thing for me that I’m not prone to get caught up in workplace rivalries.

Pete is the crew leader I enjoy working with most. He plays around a lot during his moves. His sense of humor is similar to mine - caustic and goofy and occasionally bordering on mean. Possibly off-putting, but I go for what I go for. Anyway, Pete hates David. He hates his overt seriousness, his commitment to taking charge when there’s really no need for any kind of push. Also, David’s perceived tendency to trey to make others look bad.

At first, I didn’t believe Pete when he ranted about this. What’s the point in detracting from other movers? There’s no premium for being biggest badass on any given job. But it didn’t take long working with David for these allegations to be confirmed. One habit you can count on is, when you have to two-man a heavy object with David, for him to jerk it on its side without warning. This is done ostensibly to move something at an angle so that it fits through a door or something, but it doesn’t accomplish anything if you start without warning the other guy. Immediately, you have to scurry to regain your grip, a moment of struggle that’s met with a faux-concerned “whoawhoawhoa, you got that?” from David. In his eyes, he’s become alpha mover to the customer, for whatever that’s worth.

It’s worse still when we’re working with Chris, the owner of the company who comes out of the occasional job. Here, at least, it makes sense for him to burnish his image. From a dickhead perspective, but still. There’s favor to gain. I’ve talked with David about it and advised him to get due warning when lifting some heavy-as-fuck dresser.

Anyway, the job I reference in the post title is noteworthy only because it represents the largest tip I’ve ever received from a single job. It was scheduled as a three-man job, but we were down one because someone was out sick. There was far more shit from the customer than advertised on the work order. Rainy conditions topped off the shitshow. Enough to engender some sympathy from a friendly and empathetic customer, who was also pleased that we knocked it out in the allotted hours despite being a man down.

The biggest irritation was during the move-in. I can deal with being rained out. It’s confusion during placement that drives me batshit. Visitors and friends who drop by to chat up customers during move-ins are the worst. Customers stop paying attention, so oftentimes you’re stuck with an expectant look and tired arms waiting for someone to finish a sentence and tell you where something is supposed to go. When carrying one stack of heavy book boxes, I got the order that she wanted them in her master bedroom upstairs. I get halfway up the stairs and she indicates she’s changed her mind and wants them in the living room. Then… nope. Changed again. Back up the stairs with those.

Pretty obnoxious. But then she handed up $100 each as a tip. All’s forgiven.

Duration: Five hours (two-man job)

Tip: $100 each

Been decidedly slacking with the updates, which makes sense given I had applied for another stopgap job. So why painstakingly chronicle this one.

That one was security detail for the State Department. It was actually an armed position, so I would have likely been ambling about with a gun, bound to the first killed if anything serious actually did occur. But they were willing to pay $30 an hour, so what the hey.

I went into the contractor office for a preliminary interview. Being a government contractor, they can’t be slouches with the background check. Just for that initial application, I had to bring my birth certificate, my Social Security card, my driver’s license and my college degree. Not even an official transcript, but the actual diploma. I’m not sure why Maryland (or Maryland’s J-school) decided to give out monster-sized degrees, but mine is pretty huge. One guy in the office started chuckling at me for having this giant frame in tow along with my other documentation.

Obviously, the contractor needs to know your criminal history. That’s fine; I’ve never been arrested or charged with anything. Save a few parking tickets and one speeding ticket, I don’t have any glaring traffic violations. And the tickets have all been paid off.

Then there’s drug history. All right. I made that sound more ominous than it needed to be. I’ve never done anything more serious than weed. Never had significant amounts. And while I smoke it when I can, it’s never with great regularity. I live D.C., where it’s difficult to find in ways that always amuse friends in New York and L.A. Plus: DECRIMINALIZATION! Remember that?

Of course, this is still the federal government we’re talking about, so any partaking is excessive partaking. On the application, you’re asked if you’ve tried, sold, abused drugs, lumping weed in with a raft of far more serious narcotics, so you look like a problem when you check yes to that catch-all question. You’re issued an explanation sheet where you list out all the circumstances of said drug use. I did that, fudging that it had been three years since I smoked. So, I was being honest, as some had advised, but made it distant enough to make it seem like I wasn’t getting high on the reg.

Whoopity. Turns out I was later told that the contractor’s requirement is five years without any drug use. This surprised Abby, the yinzer girl in my boxing class who works for them and recommended that I apply. She claimed someone owned up to popping pills and still got accepted. Pills, not chills is the security slogan, I guess.

So, that didn’t work out. Not that it was a huge deal. In a lot of ways, I wasn’t really all that excited about the possibility of standing around for 40 hours a week, bored senseless, even if the pay was fairly decent. What’s more, the moving jobs have picked up some in recent weeks. Not enough that I’m comfortable as of yet, but enough so that splitting my times between that and applying for full-time office jobs doesn’t feel overly lop-sided.

The one noteworthy job of late was this past Saturday morning. The fact that I’m even working weekends has worn on my girlfriend. The bulk of the time we spend together is on the weekend. Sometimes we get together on weeknights, but it’s the exception. She’s even argued that I took a job that would get me away on weekends on purpose, though you’d be hard-pressed to find a halfway good part-time job that wouldn’t make you work Saturday or Sunday. Shit, the security job would have been even worse on that end.

Anyway, this latest job - located just up the street from my place, which was welcome when I’m already waking up at the asscrack of dawn on a Saturday - was a pretty standard two-man operation with not all that much stuff. Kind of sucked that the apartment was a third floor walk-up and there was no elevator, but we could park the truck right at the bottom of the stairs, so no huge deal. The only tricky object was a sleeper sofa. Everything else was a breeze.

What stood out was that the couple - a youngish white guy and a Hispanic girl - weren’t moving anywhere. We were just hauling all their furniture to storage, about 20 minutes anyway. I don’t really chat up the customers much. Robert is notorious for doing that, which most of the other movers attribute to him trying to slack off. But I did at least ask where they were moving. The girl hesitated and said, “we’re hoping for a place around here” while shooting a playful or mock-playful glare at the guy. Not really sure what to make of that. Were they getting kicked out of their apartment? They were moving out all the furniture, but leaving a TV, a few lamps and bunch of other loose items that could easily be crammed into a car. No mattress though. It seemed like they might be sticking around for a few days, but with nothing but the floor to sleep on. Just a weird situation all around, but I wasn’t about to pry too deeply into their affairs.

Then again, they also didn’t tip us, so fuck them.

Duration: Four hours.

Tip: None.

My first shift in a week was on Saturday afternoon. Wasn’t a terribly busy week for the most part and for what jobs there were, more veteran guys pulled rank.

Getting hours one day out of the week isn’t the most tenable thing for me for a job that’s supposed to be keeping me afloat, so we’ll have to see in the upcoming weeks how this goes. The winter is the slow period for the company, I’ve been told. Summertime is flush with jobs, which strikes me as a little odd. I can understand not wanting to relocate around the holidays, but summer doesn’t strike me as a big time for transition for a lot of people.

As I’ve said, most of our customers are affluent white people. This was only the second job I’ve been on moving a black person. It just so happens that this one was very outwardly gay. Gay guys are good customers, though. Usually well prepared and good tippers, what with all the disposable income.

This one, however, wasn’t much prepared. That was because he hired packers to pack his shit and they didn’t show. That can tell you how rich this guy is. Can’t be bothered to pack his own stuff. And it’s funny because he lived in a pretty shitty neighborhood, about two blocks away from RFK Stadium. Of course, he was relocating into one of those mostly vacant new high rise towers built near Nats Park. Good to know someone’s living in one of them now.

So we arrived and the guy wasn’t much ready for us. There were loose items scattered around the places and all the shelves were still full. We started to take apart his bed and we happened upon his male porn collection under his mattress. Lovely. A lot of it was borderline because the guy was also obviously into fashion and high art. Had a lot of naked sculptures of both sexes and a bevy of books about David LaChapelle, Tom Ford and Warhol, to name a few.

I could ignore all that if the guy weren’t also wearing far too tight sweatpants and an Underarmour shirt. He was pretty portly and had some serious man boob action going on. Not something we need skipping around us while we’re trying to haul furniture out of his place.

Despite that initial difficulty, it wasn’t a terrible move. The freight elevator at his new place was really spacious. And he opted to move his office desk on his own, which eliminated our biggest obstacle of the move.

Of course, once we were finished, we discovered our crew leader locked the key inside the truck, so we had to spend 30 minutes trying to jimmy the door open with a wire hanger. Amusing how few of the Navy Yard gentrifiers seemed to carry that we were trying to force open the door of a box truck. Maybe they’re conditioned to expect some crime in their transitioning nabe.

Tip: $40 each (three-man job)

Duration: Four hours

XTREME MOVRRZ, SON

There goes my hopes of parlaying this into a reality show project. If only our company had all-black logo apparel. I can’t wait to make knowing complaints about their methods.

“Pfft. I could have 69ed that love seat on top of the couch and fit three of the tables on top. AND I’d one-strap it in the truck. These Hollywood poseurs don’t know dick.”

Job on Friday ended with a move-in at a house in Aspen Hill with a column of dirt just inside the main doorway. The wife claimed it was a popular feature in homes built in the ’60s. Not much availed in history of suburban home design, I wasn’t about to argue with her. Still, she said, she’s planning to get rid of her little indoor garden. I don’t know. I think it’s better than anything else you could do with that space.

Robert is the guy everyone makes fun of at the moving company. He’s a 19-year-old home-schooled adopted kid. I’m not up on his entire background, but I do know that his mother died when he was young and his later adoptive parents didn’t want him after long. He’s spent some time recently living at the home of the guy who runs the moving company.

He’s set up somewhere else now, but it’s far less amenable for the moving company. Apparently Robert now has to bike seven miles just to catch a bus to that takes him to a Metro station, from which he travels to wherever a job is located. He’ll be able to harangue his grandkids well with that story.

Robert is, I’ll admit, plenty dippy, but wouldn’t be as severely ridiculed for it if he didn’t embody every outdated stereotype of an airheaded West Coast kid. He’s like an updated version of Jesse Camp without the wild haircut (yeah, I realize Camp was actually from Connecticut). Robert hails originally from San Diego and is quick to mention that he finds Washingtonians generally mean-spirited.

We had two jobs today and Robert wasn’t on either of them. But he was in spirit. Heavily derided spirit, maybe, but still. The two guys I worked the jobs with spent a lot of the time mocking Robert’s many goofy mannerisms and idiosyncrasies.  I joined them, because I’m a dick and because Robert’s demeanor is pretty easy to make fun, whether you mean ill or not. They generally dislike him, but I kind of respect how he can’t help but be himself.

Not that Pete, the guy running the two jobs today, doesn’t have cause for hating Robert. Robert left a truck door unlocked last weekend on a job moving into a transitional/nascent gentrification neighborhood. The fuck-up led to Pete’s wallet getting stolen, as well as another crew member’s iPhone and Robert’s iPod. Can’t say I wouldn’t be pissed at the kid if his mistake got my wallet stolen. So it’s probably easier for me to go easy on him for being disarmingly idiotic.

Two jobs today, both incredibly easy with minimal travel between pick-up and offload. In fact, both moves were one-bedroom to one-bedroom and each new apartment was within 10 blocks of the old one.

The first one was for a guy that all three of us were pretty sure was gay. He lived at the nothernmost apartment complex of the great Columbia Heights gentrification nexus. He seemed genuinely amazed that we got the stuff out of his place and into the truck so quickly, but really he made the job easy on us by being very well prepared. It’s not often that a customer is.

The second job was a young couple moving out of a basement apartment in a rowhouse into a standard unit in a building two blocks away. What was amusing was that Pete mentioned that he had recently done a job in the drop-off building on the way to the load. To access the freight elevator, he had to carry stuff through a small taco place housed within the ground floor of the building. Turns out, he’d have to negotiate Pica Taco for the second time in a week.

Still not sure why a couple would hire a moving crew to transport their stuff two blocks. Especially when they had only enough to occupy a one-bedroom unit. Then again, the boyfriend was pretty smallish.

First job: two hours

Tip: $30 each (three-man job)

Second job: three hours

Tip: $13.33 each (three-man job)