Right before I left for college my parents were selling the house in White Plains. They had nowhere to go, so most everything we owned was being put in storage. Now, the house wasn’t a mansion, by any means. But it was pretty roomy. There are 5 of us, and we all had our own room. There were even 2 apartments in the basement, and an attic full of crap. So we are talking a lot of stuff.
Moving day comes, and for some reason me and my closest sister are the only ones around to deal with the moving men. They load up this gigantic truck, and it was packed to the brim. They had this one really skinny guy in there at the end, cramming things all over. I think they couldn’t have fit another couch cushion in that thing. So we are supposed to head over to the storage place, meet them there, and then watch them unload everything. On the way, we realize that we need to buy a padlock, so we stop off for a few minutes to get one. As we are 1 block away from the storage place, we see the movers standing around on the side of the road. As my sister is saying, “What the hell are they all just doing standing there?” I look down to the right (I was in the passenger side) and go, “oh. Ohhhh.”
The moving truck had apparently not been able to make it up the hill and the brakes went out (personal opinion? They overloaded it) and when the truck started to roll backwards, all the guys jumped out of the cab and the truck slid back, then turned and lodged itself sideways in this tiny ditch. It was a perfect fit. The cab was sticking up, but the box part was practically made for this ditch. And it is the ONLY ditch on the entirety of 9A that I know of.
So we go over, park the car, and run down there, then call my dad on a pay phone (ahh, the simpler times before cell phones were everywhere) and tell him about it. He just got all quiet, then said, “...is there a fire?” And when I said no, he kind of relaxed. So there was nothing else we could do and we ended up heading home.
Basically, people from the area ended up getting lawn chairs and sitting on the side of 9A to watch this whole fiasco. (Really, why??) They got one of those construction vehicles to come and try to pry the box out of the ditch. But the truck was so heavy, so every time the back of the backhoe thing (backhoe? Is that right?) would lift up from the weight, and then it would drop the truck. So it was repeatedly slamming the truck, and all of our belongings, up and down in the ditch.
They put chains around the truck to try and lift it out, and the chains were rubbing and causing sparks. So they had to get the fire department there, and they were waiting with their hoses for the whole thing to just burst into flames. Luckily, that never happened.
Finally, it got to the point that they decided to just cut a hole in the side of the truck and slowly lift things out of it until there was enough weight gone to lift the truck out. At this point, my parents decided to just go out to dinner. (I was too young to realize it was much more about the wine than the dinner, but I’m betting that was the important part.)
My friend Leigh came with us out to dinner, and on her way home had to drive by the incident. Even though it sounds weird in the retelling, the whole thing was extremely dramatic; she sees the flashing lights, firemen, hoses, police officers, trashy people on lawn chairs, and calls me hysterically crying. “Diane!! I JUST SAW YOUR TV ON 9A!! IT IS JUST SITTING THERE IN THE RIGHT LANE! OH GOD! IT’S AWFUL!”
Eventually they got the truck out and as they turned it over, glass and mirror just came pouring out of the hole. The good side here was that my parents had this hideous, awful, nasty mirrored wall unit thing in the living room, which was completely destroyed. Heh.
So all of our stuff went into storage, but we had to get 2 storage rooms—1 was for the stuff that seemed to be ok, and 1 was for everything that was completely broken so that the insurance company could come and look at it and go “oh yeah. Broken.” And determine how much money our broken crap was worth.
So anyway. I have yet to hear of anybody else who has had a worse moving experience.
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