Interstate Napkin Move

Winner of the $100-dollar Moving Stories Contest by Moving Memories

One of my first moving jobs back in the mid-90s was working for a company called V** *** ****. My buddy Jim & I had been working there for a couple years when the owner, finally decided we were experienced enough to handle an Interstate move on our own. The owner was never much on doing paperwork, (or much of anything for that matter) so when move day came, he gave us the move information scribbled down on a tattered piece of paper that looked like it was more of a napkin than anything. The load was fairly uneventful and after a couple of hours on a sunny Friday morning in August we departed for Boston, Massachusetts. Being in our twenties and full of anticipation for a cool adventure and weekend on the East Coast we decide to drive all night to get there and get unloaded as soon as we could, in order to have some extra time to do some sight-seeing. This was our first mistake. It was dark when we arrived in the Catskill Mountains in Western New York…. very dark. The little 20 foot box truck we were dispatched in wasn’t exactly in “ Top Form”, and the gas gauge was more of a guideline than a measure of actual fuel. As we approached “E” we decided to start looking for a place to stop for some fuel and a welcome leg stretch. We hadn’t exactly thought our whole plan through completely and at 2 am most stations who sold diesel fuel were closed for the evening. With the last cup or two of fuel left we finally found a station that sold diesel and parked there for the night and slept in the truck until it opened at 6 am.

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Our plans being put behind a little, we grabbed enough food for the day, picked up the pace and headed for Beantown. We arrived in Boston and found the exit where our instructions told us to meet the customer. Supposedly the exact unload address was tricky to find if you weren’t from that area, so we were to call him from a pay phone (remember this is the 90s…cell phones weren’t that common). We pulled into a gas station and found a phone. We should have known something was wrong when the area code on the pay phone was different from the customer’s but it didn’t register how bad our day was about to become. After 30 seconds of conversation with the customer, the expression on my buddies face went from that of anticipation to that of complete disbelief. Apparently the customer did not live in Boston... he lived in Hartford, CT! We apologized for the misunderstanding and arranged for a time to meet him. We hung up the phone and immediately called our boss. We told him we’re in Boston, to which he replied “Great! How’s the weather?” My buddy informed him we were supposed to be in Hartford, to which Gary replied “well that’s a suburb, right?” My buddy just hung up the phone. We didn’t work there for very much longer, as I recall... *sigh*... sometimes you just can’t fix stupid...

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We're not doing a contest, but we'd love to hear more funny moving stories! Got Story?