I am so sick and tired of disorganized moves

[evilhomer]

I don't know if this is better served in MiM but whatever, I am going nuts with these disorganized clusterfucks that I'm confronted with on a daily basis. Moving is not fucking difficult: You place a label on each item that you want to have moved and write it's destination, then fuck off and disappear; movers come in, see the labels, load those labelled items on the truck, drive to the new location, then read the labels and place them in that spot. It's that fucking simple. This used to be how the industry worked. It was a set in stone rule (literally in one case) that unlabelled items WILL NOT be moved. Somewhere along the line, putting a self stick label on something became too much work for the customer and greedy management didn't want to lose the business so they lost the balls to tell these customers that they're doing something wrong.

Now we just go in and rather than being able to see and know what's going on, we have to rely on the customer to tell us about each area and item individually. It's inefficient, it's annoying and it's frustrating. And of course whenever a mistake is made, it's always our fault because the customer did / didn't say something, whichever works in their favour.

Sorry for the rant, just had a real shitty day of this bullshit that pushed me over the edge. Somebody buy me a drink and a lottery ticket please.

[Pixilated]

You have my sympathy. Had a friend move from a house to an apartment. On the day of moving ... nothing was labelled. In a house full of furniture. Friend wasn't even finished packing. I was embarrassed to be there and I wasn't even the one moving.

I'd been offering for months to help pack up stuff that friend didn't want and cart it away for donation somewhere. It all went into the landfill.

[Jetfire]

Ugh. When I've moved, I admittedly don't usually label much. Usually because for the most part it's obvious where it goes, or the boxes are all Mixed Rooms regardless due to how I pack.

But at the same time, I'm there when we unload (getting friends and family to help move not pros), and I'm just saying "stick the boxes in that room; we'll unpack the boxes later." and the big furnature is easy to point where it goes.

As for using pros, since you're there asking the idiots clients anyway, can't you have a roll of labels and slap them on when they say where each piece goes? Then again that would still mean the client has to take some responsibility, and you can't have that. It's all the movers fault, no matter what.

[AccountingDrone]

All our books are in banker boxes labeled books that can be held shut with duct tape. My fabric stash is in clear plastic toters nicely closed and can be secured with duct tape. My beading supplies are in craft drawer units, and can be held shut with duct tape. assorted paperwork and miscellaneous stuff like that is in banker boxes labeled misc papers that can be held shut with duct tape. Anything in the kitchen can be packed back in their original boxes [except for stuff like the refirgerator and stove, but we have all our small appliance boxes stored for repackaging] or in the case of the less expensive dishes, drinking vessels and kitchenware that we don't intend to move can all be dumped into the trash. If we want to move it, we will pack it into a bankers box or another packing box it need to fit into. Our computer and electronics also still have the original packaging stored for repacking.

When we moved from Portsmouth VA to Connecticut, it took a week to pack and a month to re-unpack when we got here. We packed the electronics in the car which I towed behind my scout, and Rob drove the 14' truck with the cat in a carrier for company. We pretty much decided not to bring any furniture other than a futon sofa bed and an antique spinet desk. We did bring 5000 books ...

[Teskeria]

We did bring 5000 books ...

whimper. I had to leave behind about 1500 books when I moved from Boston a few years ago, and another 1000 when I moved about 6 months ago. I miss my books.

[sms001]

Somebody buy me a drink and a lottery ticket please.

Done and done! I'm gonna take the liberty of buying you a second drink, the first one disappeared awfully fast. I'll let you know how the lotto ticket turns out. (I wouldn't hold my breath/quit my job though - my lotto history is dismal at best.)

Hopefully I'll have time for the most ungrateful "moving" story ever later.

[AccountingDrone]

whimper. I had to leave behind about 1500 books when I moved from Boston a few years ago, and another 1000 when I moved about 6 months ago. I miss my books.

I am slowly scanning them all in, and we are only going to keep probably a couple hundred of the more rare or unusual ones. I much prefer reading ebooks. I have about 1200 or so ebooks now.

[Ironclad Alibi]

We pretty much decided not to bring any furniture other than a futon sofa bed and an antique spinet desk. We did bring 5000 books ...

That makes sense since furniture can easily be replaced.

I am slowly scanning them all in, and we are only going to keep probably a couple hundred of the more rare or unusual ones. I much prefer reading ebooks. I have about 1200 or so ebooks now.

I have about 130 e-books, all public domain and downloaded free from the Internet. I've been thinking about scanning in some of my older books, but haven't decided to actually do it yet. I'll probably start doing it when I get around to converting my LP records to digital files.

[evilhomer]

House moving is a whole different game, but on the end of what's frustrating me, it's much easier. On a house move, everything goes, easy, end of story. At the receiving end, big furniture is easier to guess and with a little direction it all gets placed. We're generally able to put all the boxes in a holding area. There are a whole lot of other complications with house moving, but at least the prime objective is clear - empty the house.

I'm primarily an office mover and the jobs entail - this goes, this stays, that goes to building 1, that goes to building 2, that's disposal, that's storage, that goes but not until next week; there are dozens of variables before we can even consider starting to do the move. When everything is labelled, it's clear and easy, when it's not labelled, it's a virtually impossible clusterfuck. You have to rely on memory and repeated questioning of the client (who is inevitably constantly changing the "plans" on the fly).

Then you get to the receving end, you've got dozens or hundreds of pieces of furniture that each have to go to a specific location, and the only way to figure out that location is to ask the client, who by this point has realized the magnitude of her fuck up due to her poor planning and is beyond help from the stress and not being able to cope. You've got hundreds or thousands of moving boxes that didn't look like much when they were in each of their individual office, but now you're staring at the berlin wall of moving boxes and haven't got a clue on how to distribute them because they all look the same. Each person wants their own chair back, but that can't be done because they all look the same and there's no way in hell that we can keep track of it.

The real frustrating thing is that you just want to get done and go home, we would have been done hours ago if things were labelled and things could have been placed efficiently. Instead each single item takes ten times as long to get placed because we've got to ask and wait for a decision. In the good old days, we'd just walk off the job and let them know that we'll be back when things are done properly. Now we've got to eat shit and stay till the bitter end.

[bbbr]

The company I work for moved from one state to another (rather easy to do in SE New England) last year without bothering to look up any of the environmental or labor laws in the new state to see what would have to change and when. Just remember- permits are optional (only if you want to go to jail, apparently threatened to upper management if the required environmental permits were not obtained ASAP) and its okay to make up your own rules about holidays and how to deduct taxes. We also went from a 300,000 to 100,000 square feet without any real thought as to how to squeeze all of the operations in to the condensed space in an orderly and efficient manner. Never mind dealing with a massive amount of equipment that has to be kept in storage courtesy of how production contracts are written (most of it is government owned and disposing of it, even broken stuff, is a an absolute nightmare). It took over 4 months to get all of the equipment and material out of the old building, one trailer truck (and occasionally a small box truck) load per day. Contractors still roam the facility moving and connecting equipment as better homes for it are sought out.

To say it has been an absolute cluster frig is the understatement of the year...

[AccountingDrone]

I'm primarily an office mover and the jobs entail - this goes, this stays, that goes to building 1, that goes to building 2, that's disposal, that's storage, that goes but not until next week; there are dozens of variables before we can even consider starting to do the move.

You would have loved our office move from third floor to first floor - every person in our department [37 of us] had 2 of those huge boxes with the twirly string closures that are more or less foot locker size, with the destination cube on all the sides, top and bottom. Our desk chairs had the destination cube number, and IT moved our electronic goodies on Friday/Sat/Sun and we had to be there Monday for the move to make sure everything ran smoothly. It really helped that the only furniture to be moved were the desk chairs. Our reno company had 3 weeks to get the new office furniture and cubes set up on the first floor, and they had 1 week for carpet and paint. Smoothest office move I have ever seen. Unpacking all 50+ file cabinets into the new file cabinets was a bitch though.

[Seshat]

What's so hard about labelling each chair/desk/desk-equipment set with a matching set of labels?

Walk around before the move, putting a labelled box (or two) in each cubicle, slap the matching label onto the desk and the chair, and have a big box of packing popcorn for each however-many cubicles so that the owner of that cubicle can pack their 'personal' gear and have it properly padded.

Or if the movers are to pack up the contents of the desks; at least there's a correctly-labelled box for the desk right there.

[Jetfire]

What's so hard about labelling each chair/desk/desk-equipment set with a matching set of labels?

Because doing No Work is still easier than doing Easy work in the minds of some people, even if by doing No Work, they cause themselves and everyone around them a hell of a lot More Work than if they'd done the easy stuff to begin with.

I've been involved with 2 office moves. For the most part we did each move in house, changing buildings but no outside movers involved. It was 'fun' to say the least but not too painful, other than all the elbow grease we had to put in. (Now that I think of it, it was technically 3 moves since one move was setting up our Ottawa office with gear we brought from California)

[Sapphire Silk]

I'm primarily an office mover and the jobs entail - this goes, this stays, that goes to building 1, that goes to building 2, that's disposal, that's storage, that goes but not until next week; there are dozens of variables before we can even consider starting to do the move. When everything is labelled, it's clear and easy, when it's not labelled, it's a virtually impossible clusterfuck. You have to rely on memory and repeated questioning of the client (who is inevitably constantly changing the "plans" on the fly).

You have my sympathies.

When my department moved to a new building on campus, we were told a couple of months in advance to start packing up. I did; everything except things I used every day were packed up in boxes with my new office number on a purple label as instructed.

But several of my colleagues didn't get their packing started until moving day, and were scrambling for boxes and labels. It was a bit chaotic on that end of the move while they got their collective acts together.

The movers focused on the lab stuff that was getting moved while the faculty finished packing. The Chair wouldn't start the office move until everything was ready; fortunately moving the labs was just as important and they were ready to go.

Once everything was ready those movers moved lickety split! It took very little time at that point, and unloading was even easier since there was very little furniture to be moved (we got new office furniture with the new building).

[evilhomer]

What's so hard about labelling each chair/desk/desk-equipment set with a matching set of labels?

From a customer perspective, a) like Jetfire said, doing nothing is still easier than the easiest task, and b) they don't see the need, they know which things are their's, so why can't we just know it; they expect it all to go to the truck in individual piles for each person, I can't count the number of times I've heard "what do you mean you mixed everything together?!?"

From my perspective, yeah, that is something that I do. Like if I'm taking apart a 10 piece office suite that only has one label, I'll label each piece, ditto for a computer and periphials. I'll slap some labels on when I do a walkthrough with the client. But it makes for a real inefficient start to the job because I've got 1-20 guys waiting for me to finish. I also don't come with many extra labels because the customer was already given all the labels they need and the office can't part with any more of this valuable resource. There's a lot of "that" over "there" which leads to a lot of confusion. The real problem though is for the destination. Even if I have the time to label everything, I need to know which office or cubicle it's supposed to go to. That's the problem with these mismanaged, misplanned jobs, they haven't taken the time to figure this stuff out. We get to the receiving end and rather than just matching a label to a room number, we've got to wait for the client to figure out and decide on a spot for each thing. The time required is tripled (or more).

Sapphire Silk - I doubt that was a job I was on but thank you. That kind of simple planning and considerate behaviour is all I ask for.