Packing Out: A Short Story

During the craziness of summer relocation season, one of my friends informed me that I did not adequately warn him about the insanity that is packing out. You hear stories about garbage being shipped around the world, but until you’ve experienced it, you just don’t understand. So, just for the record, here’s a general idea of how it can play out.

4 months before: If you are Type A enough, this is when you start thinking about how you really need to start putting together your household inventory – a process that is both important for insurance purposes and useful in getting you to decide what goes on the boat, what goes into storage and what is junk. However, since this is your third international move, you only have to update the inventory, and how much can you have accumulated in 3 years anyway? So you go read a book.

3 months before: You mess around with the household inventory a bit, updating it with major new items, and then decide you’ve got plenty of time. So you go read a book.

2 months before: You realize how few free weekends you have before packing out. You decide to forget about the stupid household inventory (it’s close enough!) and start going through closets and throwing things away. That bottle of shampoo that you don’t like overly much but keep around “just in case” does not need to be shipped overseas… for the third time.

1 month before: You start moving things around the apartment, creating separate zones for those items destined for storage and those items destined for shipment.

1 week before: Move? What move? You have to study for your final language exam!

1-2 days before: You drive 6 hours round trip to take the cat down to your mom’s house, because you don’t want her (the cat) to end up in a box on a slow boat to Tokyo. When you return to your house, you do all the laundry, pull everything off the walls, create a pile of items for your air shipment, put giant “STORAGE” and “GROUND” post-its on everything, get all garbage out of the house, realize that you probably should have gone through those things over there, but oh well, and just generally create chaos.

Pack-out Day 1: You realize that, although you’ve spent the last year studying Japanese, the language that you really need to know right now is Spanish. Unfortunately, you don’t speak Spanish, and your Portuguese is mixed up with Japanese, so your primary means of communication with the very nice, very hard working Team Day 1 is to point at piles and say “GO” or “NO GO” (i.e. HHE/UAB or storage). Anything more than that, and the looks on their faces do not give you confidence that they understand. By Hour 9, you are tired from trying to keep up with the packing going on in 3 different parts of the apartment. When you find them putting curtains into a box – the same curtains that you told them 5 times do not go to Japan – and they don’t understand when you ask where they put the other curtains, you decide that you don’t really care that much. By Hour 10, you stop watching them. Unfortunately, that’s also when Team Day 1, which has been working non-stop, packing and going up and down the stairs between the truck and your 3^rd-floor apartment, is also very tired and starts just throwing things into boxes. Except for the throw rugs, which they tell you that you don’t really want to ship to Tokyo. And you believe them.

Pack-out Day 2: This is the day for packing stuff for storage. This is much easier, because all you have to do is wave your arm at the apartment and say, “it all goes”. 

Now, if you were going to Brazil, it would be 3 1/2 months before you’d see your things again. But you’re going to Japan, and when you go to Japan, you can get your stuff in less than 2 months! So the nice men come to deliver the three crates with your name stamped on the side of them, and you are SO HAPPY! It’s like Christmas in September! But remember when you gave up on watching the packers because you were really tired? Well, now you have tubs full of childhood memories showing up in Tokyo – the same tubs that you thought were in a storage unit in Virginia, and that still have giant “STORAGE” post-its on the top and side – and you praise God for the tiny storage cage that you’ve been allotted in the basement. You also praise God that you won’t have to do this again for another 3 or 4 years.