Keep Your Perspective

I moved to a new apartment / rental condo this weekend, and things did not go quite as planned. I did my best to keep my perspective through the whole ordeal, and never let the situation get the best of me. Often times people will get upset our frantic is a similar situation, but adding excessive emotion to the mix tends makes things worse. Keeping a level head and keeping your perspective can help you get through a tough situation with your sanity intact.

We had my apartment all packed, but it still took 3 hours to load everything into the truck. By the time we rolled to my girlfriend’s apartment and started loading things, it was already noon. We started packing her things into boxes (some was already packed) but I started to feel a sense of urgency and began moving a bit faster. We had the elevator reserved at our new building from 8am - 6pm, but we didn’t get there till 4pm.

We arrived at our new building, we started unloading things into the elevator, knowing that we still had to return to my girlfriend’s apartment for another small load. Once the elevator was full, we hit the button and… nothing happened. The elevator sat there with its door open and we weren’t sure what was the problem. We called the janitor, and started unloading everything from the truck. We left everything in the garage and headed back for the final load - unsure that we would ever finish the job.

After loading up the truck for a final time, we stopped to eat because we realized that we hadn’t stopped running since 7am. We accepted that we weren’t going to return the rental truck until the morning, and took a few minutes to relax. We hadn’t had control of the entire day, but we had never lost control. We had done our best to keep things in perspective. Would the condo association really not let us bring our things up to our unit if we went past the 6pm deadline? Would the world stop spinning if we didn’t return the rental truck until the next morning? Beyond causing an inconvenience, nothing horrible would happen in either of these situations.

Around 8pm we arrived back at the new building and found that two of our friends had shown up to help us - and they had moved the truckload of items from the garage up to our unit. It was great of them to do this for us, as it would have taken us several more hours to finish the job on our own.

Sorry if this post is a bit rambling or doesn’t make sense. We haven’t been able to get our internet turned on, so I’m working from a local computer lab at the moment. We had called Comcast to turn on our internet, then when they arrived they told us that our building wasn’t wired for their network. Don’t they know this stuff ahead of time?

Have a crazy moving story? Feel free to add a comment and tell me about it.