I apologize again for the lack of frequent updates, especially during this, the most exciting portion of my adventure. It’s just that everything had to happen kinda fast, and I haven’t really found the time to regroup till now.
I’m writing this from a hotel room in Milwaukee. I’m about a third of the way across the country. I was once known — renowned, even — for disastrous things that happen to me while I travel (see: countless installments of my online humor column Sarcastic Voyage, as well as my book, The Sarcastic Verses). I thought I’d finally shaken that demon loose, thanks to good planning and what I’d hoped was a natural depletion of a finite supply of bad luck. I thought wrong.
Allow me to get you caught up to the present. My last day at work was Friday, March 10. This was a surprisingly lackluster affair, probably due to the fact that I’d taken to telling everyone the honest, harsh truth whenever possible already. It was great fun playing the Valuable Curmudgeon, but the downside of it was that there was no last day telling off to do. I couldn’t burn the bridge because I’d been very gradually singeing small pieces of it with a magnifying glass to the sun for the last couple of months.
Anyway, they gave me a very nice framed picture of the helicopters we’ve been working on. Which is good, because the one thing I really want in my new life away from that career is a constant reminder of the thing that drove me crazy enough to want to break loose.
Actually, it was a very nice gesture, and I probably will put it up somewhere in my new place. They even signed it, which was cool. One signature in particular really stood out. It was from the coworker with whom I had worked the longest (nearly all of my 11 years), and it was done using a custom rubber stamp with red ink. “SEE U IN HELL.” it said. A fitting send-off if I ever saw one.
So that left me six days till I was due to leave for Seattle, and about five until the movers were due to show up. This left me in a bit of a jam, as I couldn’t do a whole lot in the way of final preparations with all my earthly possessions taking up 90% of the space in my tiny apartment. Until the movers came, I mostly just had to sit and wait. Which is what I am generally inclined to do in my natural state anyway, so it wasn’t that big a deal.
The movers showed up on Wednesday: two young hispanic men and the lead guy, who not only communicated to them in Spanish and to me in decent English, but also talked on his cell phone in what sounded like Arabic. I don’t know about you, but where I come from, the kind of people who speak three languages aren’t usually working for moving companies. They’re usually spies. (And when I say “where I come from,” I mean, of course, my overactive, pop culture addled imagination.)
My community college Spanish served me well, as I occasionally caught the two younger guys (who did all the lifting) talking about me, and not in an especially flattering way. The impression that I got was that I’d packed my boxes too heavy. Also, they thought I was gay.
Once the Mexicans drove away with all my belongings, I began to make the final hasty preparations for my journey. Given that I had less than 24 hours to prepare, I’m sure I left some stuff behind and probably didn’t clean the apartment to my landlords’ satisfaction. But I suppose that’s one of the benefits of your parents being your landlords. They’ll probably get over it.
I was a little bugged with my mother, in any event. She absolutely refused to say goodbye to me, on the grounds that she would probably cry. I tried to explain to her that I’m 31 years old, and that my mother crying really wouldn’t embarrass me, particularly under the circumstances. I’m moving to the absolute furthest point I could possibly choose in the continental United States, and it’s the first time in my life that I won’t be right around the corner, or at worst, a few hours away. Crying would make sense. But she would hear none of it. Bit disappointing, really. She didn’t even remember to tell me to pack clean underwear, so I’m keeping this same nasty pair on the whole trip, just to spite her.
As the hour of my departure approached, I made my way to the last two items on my “to do in Maryland” list: turn off the internet and phone services. I probably could have done this days before, but I didn’t want to take the chance of either of them being switched off early, since both figured pretty heavily into my moving plans.
The internet took about an hour, mostly due to DirecWay’s horribly inefficient maze of phone prompts and operators who barely spoke English. As tedious as that was, however, it was nothing in comparison to what I went through with The Phone Company.
Those who have been familiar with me and my work will recall that The Phone Company has been a thorn in my side for well over a decade now. I remain convinced after my various entanglements with them that they are almost certainly responsible for the JFK assassination, as well as any number of other twentieth century horrors. I had thought that perhaps their power had been waning in this ever-increasing climate of telecommunications competition, but I’m not so sure anymore. I may just have to reopen the file on The Phone Company and their involvement with the 9-11 tragedy.
So here’s what happened with them, or to be more precise, what didn’t happen with them: they refused to turn off my phone. For some reason (“for my protection,” they kept saying), you can’t just call up the phone company and have your line turned off. For some kind of security reason, they require some extra verification that it’s really you calling them. This actually makes sense to me, and I had no problem with doing it. The problem was, they didn’t want to verify anything sensible like my social security number or my mother’s maiden name. They wanted information that was on my printed bill: my account number (not the same as my phone number) or my last bill balance. I tried to explain to them that I pay my bills online, and that I had turned off my internet service, so I had no idea what those things were. I also explained that any pieces of paper that might contain that information were in boxes on their way to Seattle.
“Look, you know it’s me,” I protested. “You can tell where I’m calling from. You’re The Phone Company!”
“Sir, anyone could be calling from your phone.”
“Yes, and anyone could steal a copy of my bill too!”
They wouldn’t budge. So my phone is still on in Maryland — another bill to pay for something I couldn’t use without Radio Shack’s longest extension cord.
Despite that minor setback (I guess I’ll take care of it from Seattle), I took off around 1PM on Thursday.
At about 4PM (I wasn’t even out of Maryland yet), I received a call on my cell phone. It was the movers. Apparently, the original weight of my stuff had been grossly underestimated, and instead of it being 3000 pounds of stuff, it was actually 6000.
I remember the conversation I had with the lady at the moving place quite clearly. I went through everything I owned in painstaking detail, and I mentioned that quite a lot of it was heavy stuff: books, comics, that sort of thing. She assured me in a confident — I’d even say arrogant — tone that she did this for a living, and she knew exactly what she was doing.
But somehow she was off by 100%. If she worked as a weight guesser at my carnival, she’d be demoted to elephant cleanup.
I got indignant with the woman on the phone (not the same one who had so poorly guessed the weight of my stuff), but she was proving to be fairly indifferent to my plight. So I bluffed: I told her I didn’t have the extra $2000 that this was going to cost me. (Yes, that’s two thousand. Two with four zeroes.) I told her quite simply that I couldn’t pay it if I wanted to. (This was a lie, but she needn’t know that.)
She told me she’d do some checking and get back with me. This was two days ago, and I have no way to reach these people right now. For all I know, all my stuff is sitting on the lawn back at my old place. (And if that’s the case, my sketchy neighbors have already made off with it.) So that’s weighing a bit heavily — ha ha — on my mind right now.
I made it to Pittsburgh without further incident, and had dinner with my friends Mark and Chrissy. This was quite nice, but since we didn’t explode into a fiery mess, it’s not really as interesting as the rest of my story. Fortunately (for you, anyway) Day Two holds just as much misery.