A Venture in Moving (and the use of Chainsaws)

I’ve had to move a few times in my life and it’s never a pretty process. Stacks of boxes everywhere start out like one of those funhouse mazes and typically end with someone’s smothered cries for help from under a heap of dusty magazines, stuffed animals, and a paper mache model of a volcano. Usually you end up finding hidden treasure troves of unwanted (sometimes unidentifiable) goodies that you never remember owning. For example, when my mother moved about a year ago, she hired a group of movers to help her unearth the mountains of boxes in the storage space that we like to call Purgatory. She noticed one man was struggling to carry a particularly heavy box and upon opening it they discovered that it was full of Barbie dolls. None of my sisters or myself ever really played with dolls, so that fact that we have an entire box full of Barbies is unexplainable (although we did enjoy putting make-up on the cat). We probably could have explained away the weirdness of the box’s contents to the movers if it weren’t for the fact that my mother made another interesting discovery half an hour later: A large brown box entirely devoted to rocks. Yes, that’s right. It was a box of rocks. Why we had saved a box of rocks is beyond me. Needless to say, the movers were a little disgruntled that they were being asked to move boxes of rocks and Barbie dolls around. But hopefully you get my point: moving can be both a treacherous and baffling endeavor.

When I found out that my office in Singapore had to move locations to a new building nearby, I figured it wouldn’t be that big of a production. After all, it’s not a house packed with years (or even generations) of weird family possessions. But nothing could have prepared me for the way Singapore does moving. You see, it started out quite normal. We packed things in boxes, labeled them and taped them up. Then the movers came and took the boxes to our new location. When the movers returned for a second load they began to bring over the furniture – still normal. It wasn’t until their third round that they began, as it appeared to me, to vandalize office property. By vandalize I mean, dismantling the air conditioning units, taking down an entire wall of mirrors, and…wait for it…removing the doors. As I found out, we were taking the doors with us. I commented on the peculiarity of this practice to my coworkers who looked at me in wonder as if to ask: “You mean, in America you don’t take your doors with you when you move?”

I was a bit dubious that our new office would look anything like an office when we finally followed the movers over. I imagined instead, that it would look more like the remains of a building that a hurricane has swept through – with odd objects, parts of air conditioning hosing, furniture, and – don’t forget - doors, laying about. And I was kind of right, but it only took a few days, about $100 worth of masking tape, some bruised shins, and maybe ten shots of espresso to get everything back in order. Not completely to my surprise, the objects that gave us the most trouble were the cabinets. We’re not talking about measly bookshelves here; we’re talking about 8-foot tall solid wood (plastic? Who knows? It was heavy!) cabinets. Our old office had a loading elevator the size of a room in which the movers were able to move these bulky pieces of furniture down one story and to the moving van. The loading lift in our new office is the size of an average business elevator. Needless to say the cabinets didn’t fit in the lift. They also didn’t fit in the stairway. (Which would have been an interesting endeavor if the movers had dared to carry these beastly things up the six stories to our office). I assumed we’d have to sell the cabinets and find smaller one’s that we could either carry on the lift or assemble in the office. I assumed wrong. Instead, one of the movers went out and bought a chainsaw and chopped the cabinets in half in the parking lot– as if to greet our new office mates with a hearty,” Hello! We’re your new neighbors and we like to destroy furniture! Thanks for having us!” I tried to act like this was all totally normal, since no one else seemed to mind. Maybe Singapore is just the place to be if you have a personal attachment to your door and like taking chainsaws to heavy office furniture.