Underappreciated

Two Saturdays ago, I moved from somewhere in Hartamas to somewhere in TTDI. Now for those of you who've been to my house, you'll know how crowded with furniture it is, and how heavy they look. Let me tell you something, in this case, looks are certainly not deceiving. My mother-in-law has a fascination for teakwood, bulky, HEAVY furniture, and the house is FILLED with it.

Thinking it should be enough, she rented out two two-tonne lorries, which, to our horror, turned out to be really really tiny. Luckily, around 5-6 movers came with those.

The point of this post is, the movers managed to cart all the heavy furniture to TTDI on the same day. It's really not an easy feat if you've seen the amount of furniture we have, and a part of me was thinking that we probably should appreciate these people more.

Among my movers that day was a teenager whose voice hadn't even cracked yet and an old man who looked like he should be at home, watching tv or reading the papers with a pipe in his hand. But together with four other men, the grunted and lifted and pushed that tremendous amount into the lorries. Look at it this way: If we had only rented one lorry, that one would have made 7 trips to and fro alltogether. SEVEN.

Watching them do their thing, I marvelled at how coordinated they seemed. Not only do they have to manouver those wooden dinosaurs around the crooks and crannies of the house, they also had to have good space coordination and arrange the furniture on the lorry so that it took up as little space as possible. And that's not even counting the heavy lifting itself.

I don't think many of us would resort to a job as gruelling such as that, and my take on it is that there is a lot more to movers than we think. So the next time you move and you think the movers are charging exorbitant prices, think again. It's not easy.