man with a van: a cautionary tale

"i thought you said you had a van." i said in as normal a voice as i could muster.

"it is a van." was his fairly hot retort.

i moved. switched houses and got the hell out of the fake-wall-weird-roommate-non-public-transportation-access-having house. hooooo fuckin ray. last year when i moved to new york, i decided that next time i moved, i was gonna hire someone for a couple of hours to actually help me transport my stuff because i hate having to put my friends out for that sort of work. plus, it's a total pain in the ass for me too. i don't have too many things to move because some things are in storage and generally i haven't accumulated too terribly much in the way of furniture that i'm attached to.

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taped on phone poles all over new york city are leaflets advertising movers. moving-esque companies that have competitive rates, such as $15 per man, per truck with a 2 man, 2 hour minimum. if you quickly do the math on this (i have a math major to loan if you can't), that is a pretty good deal. tip them and get them a case of beer for afterward and you are good to go. so i had collected a couple of these to call on in the case that one wasn't available. but then (dun dun duhhhhhnnn), i was told about the movers on craigslist. craigslist is an interesting phenomenon is a dichotomy within itself. occasionally, it can be extremely useful. a couple of different people steered me away from the phone pole movers and onto craigslit to just get a "man with a van".
these men and their vans are random people who have day jobs during the week, but who own or rent large vehicles and then lease themselves out to people to transport whatever it is that you have to move. for instance, you can call a man with a van to take you to ikea to pick up some furniture, instead of paying for delivery. you can have the man with a van take you to costco to do your bulk shopping. this is generally cheaper and less of a hassle then renting a car or begging your driving-favor overstressed friends.

"they always end up being cheaper and they work harder and faster." said a friend. "when i moved a few months ago, that's what i did and it didn't even take 2 hours."

so i gave it a try....went through some ads and made a couple of phone calls and looky here, we have a mover. easy as pie, the guy is friendly and fairly well spoken and he's available on saturday. i tell him what i have to move and give him some actual dimensions because i have a large dresser, but he says we will have no problem and we move on. he and his van will be over to move me around 3:30 - 4:00. sweet.

i relax, pack, get things ready and think excitedly about moving on saturday into my clean, freshly painted apartment with no roommates. i even had many of the boxes provided for me, due to a couple of complimentary circumstances. "everything is comin up just fine." i thought.

then saturday rolls around. i go over to the storage unit and get the things i needed from there and drop them off in the new, uncleaned, unpainted apartment. no biggy....i have the mover coming so i jaunt on back to the old place and start getting ready for the movers. i get the boxes and the furniture moved out into the living room. i put the finishing touches on the packing and got the room cleared out for the new person. while i do this, i listen and sing to music, i dance around a little and i prepare everything for easy and quick transportation and installation. go me.

at 4:30 i place a call to my man with a van. it's getting late and although another of his moves may be taking longer, i need to know what is going on. this actually raised my hackles a little, but it was too late to reverse course, so i just went with it. he had accidentally forgotten to bring my phone number and was waiting for me to call so he could come over. fine. so at approximately 5pm, my man with a van showed up at my door. he was about 5'8" tall and of average to low-average build and he smartly sported a back brace. he carried with him a small handcart like you would find in wal-mart, maybe. my man with a van told me that since there wasn't too much stuff, what we would do is move everything to the elevator and then load it all in over 2 trips and move it out. and by 'we', he meant me. so i went with it in the interest of expediency and because he had no one helping him. my illusions of an easy move were waning.

we moved everything to the elevator, he surveyed the space and we packed it all in there. it took 3 trips. this would have been fine except that rather than load the things that took 2 people on the first trip and then splitting the labor to keep the flow going, we had to be together at all times. he was chipper and talkative so i focused on his positive energy and just kept working.

the progression continued. stuff to the elevator, down the elevator, around the long hallway to the door and we're ready to get the stuff up onto the little road in my apartment complex and into the VAN. i'm workin hard and feelin good. i hop back on the quickly and smoothly bandwagon and start to plan out what i'm going to put where in the new house. i carry the first boxes up to the top of the stairs and the happy music came to an abrupt halt. there was no van. i started to panic; did the stupid security guards have it towed? what will i do next? how will i pay for this? my brain is racing to find a solution to the problem. i notice a car parked in the area that has a bright orange sticker on the windshield; an annoyance that the complex presses onto you if you park in the area for more than 30 minutes. i reasoned that the cargo van might have frightened their fragile security, so they towed.

right about this time, man with a van pops out with a box and starts to get very agitated. turns out he had a bright orange sticker on the window of his van. he was afraid he'd have to pay a ticket.
wait......that is a 1993 dodge MINIVAN. where is the cargo van? the big, cavernous, one-trip-only cargo van? there was suddenly a flurry of activity in my veins and i had to take a second to process everything. i looked around to see which of my friends was hiding, waiting to tell me it was a prank and ha ha. no such thing occurred. this was it.

"i thought you said you had a VAN." i said in as normal a voice as i could muster.

"it IS a van." was his fairly hot retort.

clearly i had insulted him in my assertion that a fucking minivan does not count as an actual van. that's why they gave it the distinction of mini. you have to qualify that shit when you have something mini. this is true on all levels. mini bagels, mini cars, mini skirts. things that are not the full item are mini because they are small. this was a MINI van. my heart sank and inside i heaved a heavy sigh. on the one hand, it's the most obvious question to pose. however, when one advertises as "man with a van" and says that for your small move, he only sees it taking one trip in his van to move everything, well it's safe to assume that he does indeed have a van.

now i won't bore you with the rest of the story in great detail, but the end result is that after 5 hours of slow and careful moving (which should have been 2 hours TOPS), i dropped the boxes for the last time that day, trotted up to the deli on the corner and picked up some soup for dinner and some cereal and juice for breakfast. i ate the soup while i moved everything to the area of its eventual location and then assembled the bed, got in it and hit the lights.

i sit here now in my cleaner, happier apartment and twinge a little, but it's all good now.

....but be warned, my friends. things are not always what they initially seem to be. sticking with the mid-range option is really the best thing to do sometimes, despite your budgetary concerns.