I've been helped through some hard times myself, so when I find myself in a position to help others, I like to do so. I also like spending time with my friend Emily and her husband, Rob, so I figured helping them move with my beast of a car in exchange for a tank of gas instead of leaving them to rent a U-Haul AND buy gas was probably a great deal for them. I also figured it would be lots of fun for all involved. They went for it.
I think we all naively envisioned a sitcom-like experience, which is to say, we thought it would be pretty entertaining and over in half an hour.
I drove from Sandusky to Akron that night thinking we'd throw their few remaining belongings that couldn't fit in Rob's Mustang into the back of my station wagon and be on our merry way. Instead, when I arrived, a lot of stuff still wasn't even in boxes yet.
Part of being in your twenties, I think, is that while you may have accepted the fact that you're going to have to spend a fair amount of time doing things you don't really like to do, you haven't yet lost your feeling of invincibility with regard to how quickly you will get them done.
You give yourself way too much slack-time before attempting the tasks to be completed because it won't take nearly as long as everyone with both feet firmly rooted in reality keeps insisting that it will. You know that you have to do it, and you plan to do it, but you just don't believe that it will take that long.
This is when the everyday things in life become monstrously overwhelming. Like moving.
So I arrived, and several rooms still had yet to be packed up. Emily was cleaning the master bathroom but the master bedroom was all clear, so she handed me the vacuum cleaner hose extension and put me to work sucking up dust from the molding around the bottom of the walls.
Not very entertaining, but I was done in probably 3-5 minutes, so it didn't faze me at all. We still had plenty of time.
Emily had a crafting nook in the apartment, and lots of things of a fragile nature that still needed to be wrapped. I tackled it, thinking even that would not put us behind our 30-minute sitcom schedule. She helped me, and that sealed the deal. This was going to be so easy. I was a hero for helping. With me there, everyone could get everything done way faster!
And while we were doing that, Rob was busy shredding piles of papers they didn't need anymore, occasionally checking with Emily to make sure it was all right.
Him: "Can I shred this car title?"
Her: "....WHAT CAR TITLE?!"
(momentary discussion)
Him: "Can I shred the shredder manual?"
Us: "Go for it!"
(two minutes later)
Him: "Can I shred something that's stapled, or do I have to take out the staples first?"
(nervous silence)
Me: "...I guess we'll never know now..."
And so on. It was shaping up to be just like in my sitcom-fantasy after all. We were getting stuff done, we were making each other laugh, everything was great.
We were hugely proud of ourselves for getting everything "packed up", until we realized that all we'd really done was take a bunch of boxes and small pieces of furniture and put them in the middle of the living room floor. We had effectively moved one room into the other.
No matter. That just meant it was time to start loading up my car. Really, we were moving along quite nicely. It could be an hour-long sitcom. That's a thing, right?
So we huffed and puffed our way up and down the stairs a few times until we'd tightly packed my car from the floor storage on up to the roof with boxes and furniture. I'm not sure how much time had passed at this point, I had lost track, but the sun was still shining. Granted, it was setting, but still shining nonetheless.
Our arms and legs ached from lifting and climbing stairs, but it was the satisfying kind of ache that goes along with having shown the "real" grown-ups of the world that it can be done. You're really that much more efficient than your parents ever were, and you feel a little sad for them, because they spent so much of their youth on this sort of thing when it was completely unnecessary.
Rob was the first to discover how wrong we were.
He came down the steps with another load to go into my car and realized before we did that there was just no way.
When we saw the worry in his eyes, we stopped leaning on the car and walked around the back to see if things could be rearranged to accommodate the microwave in his arms.
Not only was there no room left, but my car was sitting noticeably lower to the ground than it had been when I arrived. Its spatial and weight capacities had been surpassed.
And the microwave wasn't all that was left.
Rob tried to explain this to us, but we insisted what was left could EASILY fit into the trunk of his car.
After much persuasion on our part, Rob accepted the burden of reality quietly, allowing us to hold fast to our childlike delusions. He turned and slowly trudged back up the steps with the microwave, and we set out for Toledo, leaving him to deal with our gross overestimation of square footage to be found in the trunk of a Ford Mustang.
Incidentally, our wake-up call came much later, when they ended up needing (among other things) a new microwave.
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