After a pleasant evening of dinner on the balcony while watching the sun set behind the Space Needle and sharing a bottle of wine, Tom headed down to take Theo for her final pee before bedtime. We now live on the 5th floor of an apartment building in Seattle, so it has become his job to take Theo out during the sketchier hours.
After a few minutes I heard the front door rattling and went down the hall to see what was up. Tom couldn’t get the latch open. He rattled some more, and then I rattled from my side, trying to help him, and we both saw very quickly that something was wrong. We turned the knob every way, we applied the credit card approach (has that really ever worked for anybody? anybody?) and then Tom instructed me to get his tools, which I thrust uselessly at every bit of metal that seemed to be associated with the doorknob, but nothing worked.
While Tom proceeded to take apart the knob from the hallway, I resorted to what I do best: dialing. I called the emergency maintenance number for our apartment building about 10 times, knowing that I was not ingratiating myself by disturbing someone at 12:30am only 3 days after taking up residence here. But if they didn’t want that to happen, they should have made sure their doorknobs, you know, opened the fucking door.
Finally somebody responded. A youngish-sounding woman told me she’d be right over. Now, I have every faith in my sex and I know we can do amazing things like birth children, but I admit I immediately leapt to the conclusion that a woman would be useless in this situation. After all, Tom is pretty adept at taking things apart and fixing them, even if it takes him several hours to do so, and he couldn’t figure out the door, which seemed to be completely stuck. I didn’t see what use this woman would be, and frankly was concerned for her coming over to our apartment in the middle of the night.
After a few minutes I heard Tom speaking with the woman in the hallway, and then some more rattling. More mumbling and then silence. “What’s going on?” I called to Tom on the other side of the door. (This whole scenario reminds me of the scene in Gremlins when the two mogwai are on either side of a cardboard box and bang on it to communicate. Anyway.)“She was trying to pry the lock with a butter knife,” Tom said. I could hear the disdain in his voice. “She’s gone to get a better tool or something.”
I rolled my eyes. See, I told you. A woman was no good in this type of crisis. Lots of other kinds of crises, yes, but not a lock-related crisis.Sure enough, she returned to rattle at the door some more, presumably with a bigger and/or better tool, with no luck. I sat on the other side, waiting breathlessly. Theo scratched, wondering what odd new game we were playing.
“Have you tried pushing it?” I heard the woman ask Tom.
“Pushing it? The doorknob?” he asked.“No, the door,” the woman said.“Um, no…” Tom answered. Thinking, of course, that the last thing we would want to do is explain to the police why he was caught trying to bust down our own door three days after moving in. And then he quickly said, “Karen, stand back!”
I leapt up and backwards as the first BAM resounded. The second BAM brought a large, stocky woman, complete with mullet, barrelling into my apartment, splinters of wood flying everywhere. I kid you not. The woman stopped herself short in the middle of the hallway, holding a large piece of what used to be our door. She was no taller than my shoulder.
“Holy SHIT,” I said.
“That was IMPRESSIVE,” Tom said.
“My name is Lori,” the woman said.
I will never doubt again. And I will certainly do my very best NEVER to piss off Lori.
We sprang up bright and early at 7am on Moving Day, which was last Sunday the… 29th I believe. The movers were due to arrive at 8am so in short order we packed up all the last-minute stuff, stuffed the dog in the bathroom along with our suitcases so as to make sure neither she nor they were loaded into the truck, and then… waited. And waited.
Everybody knows that when you move you are at the mercy of the movers. And the last thing you want to do is piss them off. If you didn’t have all your kitchen equipment packed, you would have cooked a three-course meal for them which would be piping hot upon their arrival, and in order to avoid taxing them too much you try to load as much of your own furniture as possible. All this because as soon as they have all of your wordly posessions on their truck, they hold every single card.So when 9am came and went, I left a very chirpy, very breezy message for the moving company: “Hey, this is Karen! I thought you guys were coming at 8am! I must have misunderstood! Please give me a call whenever you get a chance! If it’s not too much trouble!”
Around 10:30 I received a call from Victor, who is Russian, so it is pronounced “veek-tore.” Veektore’s English was not very good, nor was his cell phone reception, but he managed to inform me groggily that he just woke up and he’d be there in an hour or so.“Okay!” I chirped. “No problem!” And promptly slumped potato-sack like on the couch, because I had not had my coffee and the situation was quickly becoming a medical need. When I hired the movers, the salesman, who spoke perfect English and was extremely charming, natch, estimated our posessions to weigh approximately 4,500 pounds, which in moving terms was “nothing” and would take “hardly any time at all.” So based on this information I had made a series of ridiculous assumptions: 1) the movers would show up at 8am; 2) the movers would take only a couple hours to move all our stuff onto the truck; 3) we didn’t really own that much stuff; 4) we would be on the road, and thus I would be able to buy coffee somewhere, by 11am at the latest.
Tom, who understands but does not like or appreciate my medical need for coffee, offered to drive up to the local bagel shop and pick some up for me. This was extremely generous of him because attached to the car was a small trailer loaded with approximately (and for once I am not exaggerating) 1,500 pounds of the stuff we considered too valuable to let the movers handle.I continued to wallow like something sub-human on the couch until, a little after 11, I heard the distinct grumble of a very large truck. As the dog started to bark frantically from the bathroom, I lept up, summoned every ounce of reserve energy I had, and greeted Veektore like a long-lost friend.
Veektore turned out to be about a hundred feet tall. He was a big, solid man. So just in case there was any possible ire rising up at his three-hour tardiness, the desire to express it was now firmly squelched. Veektore had also apparently treated himself to a real Russian breakfast of straight Vodka, if one was to guess by his breath, and spoke as if he should be busy making “big trouble for Moose and Squirrel” rather than driving a truck in Alabama. (I stole this line from an old Murphy Brown episode when Murphy meets a rival Russian reporter. I couldn’t help it; it’s too good to pass up in regards to the Russian mover.)
After about forty-five minutes of paperwork, in which I signed away my rights to anything, including my own posessions, Veektore and his cohort, whose name I did not catch and whose English sucked worse than Veektore’s, got down to work. By “got down to work” I mean, brought one or two boxes out onto the street at a time (where they remained in the burning noon sun, forming a giant pile of our stuff that the neighbors enjoyed perusing as they slowly drove by on their way home from church) in between answering their cell phones, which rang approximately every two minutes (again, this is not an exaggeration). Veektore caught up with all his distant relatives while our boxes remained sitting in the middle of the street for the next 6 hours.
Sometimes Veektore would hang up the phone to graciously wrap a piece of our furniture with forty-seven blankets and about a million yards of shrink-wrap, for which we were being charged by the foot. I watched in dismay, desperately trying to keep the cheerful, optimistic, “no problem Veektore!” expression on my face, as I ticked off the cost in my head. When Veektore was done wrapping our furniture - any one piece of which took approximately an hour - I swear you could drop it from the top of the
So what I did was, I laughed.
