Completely new to military life

[Flash]

I experienced the full spectrum of movers during my career, everything from no-complaints-at-all to jaw-dropping-shitshow. My favorite was leaving Norfolk and the packers up and quit in the middle of the process because they weren't willing to work past 6 PM. As in, just got in their van and fucked off, never to return, no conversation with us, nothing. Mind, they hadn't even showed up until early afternoon and then immediately took a lunch break. Then-Mrs Fester and I were sitting in our kitchen in the middle of piles of half-packed boxes and suddenly realized it'd gotten awfully quiet. It was one of those "pack one day, load and move day two" deals, and the truck was due at 0800 the next day. Spent a couple of hours having very animated phone calls with the company and PPO.

 

[sevenhelmet]

I experienced the full spectrum of movers during my career, everything from no-complaints-at-all to jaw-dropping-shitshow. My favorite was leaving Norfolk and the packers up and quit in the middle of the process because they weren't willing to work past 6 PM. As in, just got in their van and fucked off, never to return, no conversation with us, nothing. Mind, they hadn't even showed up until early afternoon and then immediately took a lunch break. Then-Mrs Fester and I were sitting in our kitchen in the middle of piles of half-packed boxes and suddenly realized it'd gotten awfully quiet. It was one of those "pack one day, load and move day two" deals, and the truck was due at 0800 the next day. Spent a couple of hours having very animated phone calls with the company and PPO.

That's a good one. My favorite was the packers that used my wife's good business suits, dress shirts, and underwear as packing material. They also broke a bunch of things totaling a couple of thousand in damages. Then there was the time I did the move survey over the phone, told them EXACTLY how many cubic feet our shipment would take (about 42 feet of a 53' moving trailer from our previous move), and they disregarded what I told them instead sent a 26' freightliner to move our entire four bedroom house. Needless to say, we had a storage move and an overflow shipment stemming from that one, which was SUPER fun since I was PCSing out of the USN, on a personally procured move after the local household goods office had basically given up because COVID.

Moving fucking sucks. I don't want to do it again for a long time. But I will also say one of our moves, China Lake to Pax River, was very professionally handled and the driver and packers were awesome. Nothing got broken, and all our stuff was categorized appropriately. It can be done. I wish I could have hired that guy for every PCS move I ever did.