We were supposed to have moved in today. If everything had gone according to plan, I would now be typing this in our new apartment, having spent the day supervising movers and starting to unpack boxes.  Instead, I’m in the guest bedroom at my parent’s house (my bedroom having long since been taken over by the Munchkin), trying to adjust to Eastern time and wondering exactly when I’ll make it to New York.

It feels as if just about everything that could go wrong has. It took us a week longer than we had budgeted to find an apartment, leaving me stranded in New Jersey.  Two unscrupulous rental companies and about a dozen match-box size apartments later, we ended up in the very first building we looked at.

Now that we’ve got the place, we’re having issues with the movers.

It turns out that there’s a reason they were so cheap. The Better Business Bureau gave them an “F” rating. That’s the kind of thing a company has to work to achieve. There are horror stories all over the internet about everything from shipments not sent to shipments held hostage at the other end of the move. The best part is that we have a friend with a moving company who checked them out and said they sounded legit. We checked them out and they looked legit, too.  I’d like to think that A and I are reasonably intelligent people, but the fact of the matter is that we missed all the warning signs.  That neither of us knew what to look for because we haven’t done this kind of move and that we’ll know how to spot the scammers next time is small consolation.

Now we’ve got to decide whether to roll the dice and pray that they actually ship our stuff  and that the movers in Manhattan don’t demand an extra $1000 or so at delivery time or whether to cut our losses and hire a company like Mayflower that actually cares about its reputation.  About the only upside to all of this is that both sets of parents live close enough that borrowing basic household items, like towels, to get us through until the movers get here, is an option.

A’s planning to go by their office on Monday and pick up all the documentation they should have given us (like a written, signed estimate) but didn’t.  I’m not holding my breath.