Is It OK to Lie To Your Movers?

A very late post today…after a day of moving madness with the WORST MOVERS IN THE WORLD? LOL.This evening we sat around laughing about how absurd our day with the movers was. Truly, as horrendous as the day may have looked to an outsider I laughed to tears more than once today.

Have you ever hired someone and soon felt that they weren’t going to be able to deliver? We had 3 movers come to move our sparsely furnished 2 bedroom, plus basement home into a trailer. They had THE best advertisement EVER and I was SURE I could spot a winner when it comes to this stuff. I figured we would be done in 3 hours. WRONG! 🙂

It. Took. Almost 5 hours. Bahahah. Truly laughable. Especially because it was 6 people (the three movers plus Chris, Tracey and me), all the boxes were packed and in the garage-feet from the trailer and Chris was asked to help the three guys move things like a small dresser or little sofa. I’ve been so lucky with great movers all over the WORLD and I happened to stumble upon this interesting tribe.

They brought ZERO materials. When we got low on the supplies we had, I went to buy some more. They stretch-wrapped everything like 50 times so of course we needed more!  The main “stretch-wrapper” said he needed breaks after wrapping a piece of furniture because it makes him dizzy. As they moved or prepped, we all heard them saying things like, “NO, not that way, that got us fired last time!” Sometimes they spent 20 minutes wrapping and padding something and then squished it out the door, tearing all the padding off so they had to re-pad and re-wrap again once the furniture was outside. I was literally shocked into staring.

Chris called me as I was driving to the U-Haul store for the re-supply and suggested we fire the team and quickly find someone else. I was super surprised that he was that upset-he’s normally so mellow. I wanted to fire them too but we HAD to get this done and suffering through another 2 hours of the worst moving decisions and work-ethic was easier than scrambling to find movers at 5:00 p.m. The moment I left to get more supplies, they all just stopped working all-together! Chris started delegating specific tasks.

When I got back, I was fired up. I felt like I was in the military again at one point and said, “This is ridiculous, there are going to be items going from the house and into the trailer continuously,” as the guys were standing outside doing NOTHING while I was moving boxes from the house to the trailer! The biggest rest-taker decided to quit at that point. HA! Awesome! Now we were only paying 2 people an hour for us to move ourselves. We paid the guy who “quit” and he hugged CHRIS! BAHAHAHA.

Finally I did something I don’t usually do…I told them the trailer was going to be picked up within the hour when in actuality I hadn’t even scheduled the pick up time. A total lie. The pace went from a 2 out of 10 to a 3.5 out of 10.

I fibbed! I felt like we were going to be moving for a million hours longer if I didn’t have a deadline for these guys.

I wish I had a video of Chris and I padding and stretch-wrapping our leather sofa as one mover looked on with supportive words, the other mover standing and looking on from the trailer. What cheerleaders. 🙂

The worst part was when we had to pay them. Sigh. What a lesson…but really you know how happy we were that it was just all over? You know how happy I was when I got to be the one to go and get more supplies? It was painful to watch those guys!

How do you deal with situations like these? Usually I’m a motivator but today I was so fired up that I resorted to yelling and lying!

Here’s a video of kind of what it was like with the Worst Movers Ever.

Pictured above was a few days ago when we had no idea of what the movers were going to be like. I miss that day. 🙂

Chris and Tracey packing the TV in the “MAN CAVE.”