Greetings from Boise!
Some of my Facebook friends have heard parts of this
already. However, I want to tie it up all neat with one little bow. Let’s start with a bunch of mixed metaphors. Atlas may
have held the world on his shoulders, but when it came to the Wilsons, Atlas
Van Lines assuredly dropped the ball, fumbling on their own five yard line. It
was so bad that if they were in the NBA they would have been called for traveling.
Do you know how bad you have to suck to get called for traveling in the NBA? Which
is sort of ironic considering that traveling in a sense is what they are
supposed to do, but in this case they kept tripping over their own feet. A journey of two thousand miles begins with a single step, except for these guys when it began by falling on their face.
Let’s start with Day 1, loading the truck on Friday, July
26. We have sold the house and must vacate by Sunday midnight, July 28. Atlas
Van Lines is there and moving our stuff out of the house and into their truck
with a delivery date to our new house in Boise of between Thursday Aug 1 and
Monday Aug 5. We have a contract for all this for which we agree to pay the
princely sum of almost $11,000.
With the truck half or possibly 2/3 loaded, the driver is
taking inventory of remaining stuff in the basement. He moves a plastic
container, which is sitting on top of another plastic container, both of which
have probably not been moved in ten years. To his horror, he finds some dead
bug bodies and one little brown bug crawling across the top of the bottom
container.
“Bed Bugs!”
Trust him, he’s seen hundreds of them and there is no doubt.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this Mr. Wilson, but you have bed bugs and we
can’t move your stuff. We are prohibited by law from transporting your
infestation. We are going to have to unload the truck and disinfect it.”
WTF?
I can go on and on about the several discussions we had, but
they boil down to one common theme.
Me: “How do you know they are bed bugs? Those things don’t
live in basements; they need human blood to live and there are no indications
of them in any of the living areas.”
HIM: “Trust me. I’ve seen them hundreds of times. You have
Bed Bugs!”
ME: “But look at this picture on the internet of a Carpet
Beetle. It looks a little bit like a bed bug and a lot like the bug you found, but likes basements because the stuff it likes to eat is there: wood, paper, wool.
Let’s wait for the exterminator you said you are going to use on your truck. He
will be here in a 3 hours and if they are bed bugs, then you can unload and
disinfect.”
Him: “No.”
Atlas unloaded all the stuff they had spent much of the day loading.
They just took it off the truck and piled it in our house wherever was the
easiest space, mostly the garage at my urging. I was hoping they would be coming back soon and this would make the loading that much quicker.Then they were gone. At 6 pm the
exterminator showed up and said, “You don’t have bed bugs, you have a few
carpet beetles that probably came in through the basement window earlier this
summer.”
It’s 6:00 pm on Friday night, and all of our stuff is still in our
house and not on its way to Boise. Worse, we have to be out of the house by
midnight on Sunday, because, you know, it’s not our house anymore. We sold it
to a nice lady and her two kids. Did I mention that Atlas does not load or unload trucks on
weekends?
Cheryl did her combo Mommy, Wife, Queen Bitch Thing (I love that
one!) and tore into some Atlas people. Finally, some corporate dude in some far
off out of state office promised that a truck would show up Saturday or Sunday
with a crew to load it. Great. Except that instead of beginning our drive to
Boise on Saturday, we will have to stick around in a hotel in Columbus for
another day or two.
So the same driver shows up Sunday morning, but with a
different crew. He apologized, of course, and we were gracious about it. He
told Cheryl the original crew was too embarrassed to come back. They loaded the
truck and off they went. But not before Cheryl asked when they were going to
arrive in Boise, to which she was informed that this truck was not going to
Idaho. They were going to their Columbus warehouse where they would unload the
entire truck and a different truck would come along, reload our stuff and head
for Boise.
That sounded like a lot of unnecessary work to us, not to
mention increasing the possibility of breakage from the extra handling of
loading, unloading, loading, unloading, loading and unloading again. Oh well,
not our business, except it’s our stuff that could be broken.
When will that second truck get to Boise, we asked? Don’t know; we
haven’t found you a truck or driver yet, they said. So you know where this is going right?
We were finally told we wouldn’t get our
stuff until the very last day on the contract, Monday, Aug 5. Had to expect
that, I guess, given all the loading, unloading, loading, unloading, loading
and unloading again.
We gave the kid a hug, who was headed for Michigan and then
on to Baltimore to stay with his cousin, and pulled out of town headed west on
Monday morning, July 29. Cheryl drove her mustang and I had the truck pulling the
trailer and two motorcycles, and the cat in a rabbit cage in the back seat, not
to mention all the stuff in the back of my truck and crammed onto the trailer that
Atlas would not take. Stuff like aerosol cans, guns, ammo, propane tanks, our
clothes, two fireproof safes with our personal papers, and so on. I was
seriously overloaded in the truck and trailer. Still, we took it easy and with Cheryl doing a very credible job as wing man, we took four
rather uneventful days to get here, arriving on Thursday evening, Aug 1.
Cheryl called Atlas to verify when they would arrive. Guess
what? They hadn’t even left Columbus yet, so it would be like Wednesday, Aug 7.
Remember that thing about a contract and they promised to deliver by Monday? That
doesn’t seem to matter to them. Cheryl
called them on Monday, the 5th, and guess what again? Still hadn’t
left Columbus yet, so now delivery is set for Friday, Aug 7.
I won’t get into the whole thing about our extra expenses
of trying to live without any furniture and most of our belongings, and trying to do everything on the cheap, which caused us some serious
discomfort and hardship, because we have no confidence whatsoever that Atlas
will ever pay us a dime for it. Several less than satisfactory telephone conversations and a look at the Atlas claim form in which they clearly say
they ain’t promisin' nothin’ and may not pay if they don't feel like it, made it quite clear it is going to be fight to get anything out of them.
The truck did arrive on Friday and the driver and crew were
very nice and efficient. Perhaps a little too efficient. If you didn’t watch
them carefully stuff would just get put in the place easiest for them to carry
it to. Cheryl had every box labeled according to the room it went to, and each
room was labeled with little signs, including a brief list of the stuff that
was to go into each. We are still finding boxes labeled “Bedroom 1” or “Kitchen”
stuck in a corner of the garage or next to the shed on the side of the house. One of the crew, probably carrying the patio
heater, broke a brace holding a curtain for the patio; just left the rod and
curtain lying there on the ground which we didn’t discover until after they
were gone. Probably the same guy must have hit is head or a chair on the dining
room hanging lamp, knocking the cover from the ceiling. Again, found that one after
they were gone, too. I hope it was his head and it hurt.
And, stuff is broken. We are still assessing that.
Cheryl’s grandmother’s china teapot is one example. It was wrapped in double
bubble wrap in a box clearly labeled “fragile" and the box was just as
clearly partially crushed. Lots of little things like that. Just the thing you would expect with all that
loading, unloading, loading, unloading, loading and unloading again. One of the
little clauses in the contract says that they aren’t responsible for breakage
of things in boxes if they didn’t pack the things into the boxes. We, that is to say Cheryl,
packed our stuff. The cost to have them do it is uber prohibitive.
The claim we make to Atlas should be very interesting. For example, just because they didn’t pack the boxes, doesn’t mean they can crush one and break stuff in it. Add to that the breakage of the curtain and hanging light. And on top of that is our extra expenses directly related to them being 5 days late. I suspect that some of you are asking why we didn't just deduct what we think we are owed from the amount we pay them to do the move. Too bad it doesn't work that way. To get our stuff off the truck here in Boise we had to pay the driver right then and there. If we don't pay, he doesn't unload? No tickee, no laundry. So they have our money and now we are going to have to work to get some of it back. What they don’t understand is we know how this works, and we know what buttons to push and levers to pull.
Most importantly, Atlas seems to have forgotten that simple
rule of business. Treat one customer right and he will tell three people.
Treat him wrong and he will tell 20. Wait, that was the old rule. In the case of our modern telecommunication centric society, he can and will tell 200 or maybe even 200,000.
