The Sound of One Hand Packing

There are of course, many things worse than losing your job. From being forced to watch 9 straight hours of SpongeBob Squarepants with your feet glued to a paint mixer, to having President Neuvo Bush read something you wrote....out loud....in public....in front of cameras.

But one of these things is also....changing locations and keeping the same job.

1. You're usually expected to actually DO your job and move at the same time to some degree. So if you happen to have a particularly stressful job...more to the joy of the whole experience. I wonder if Air Traffic Controllers ever have to actually 'move'. Do they have Pioneer leering over their shoulders as they guide planes into the pattern...trying to pack up the slinky and yo-yo collection and avoid mid-air collisions all while someone asks them for a new address they obviously haven't memorized yet but had better get it right because otherwise the Pez dispenser collection will end up on a tuna trawler going to Grenada. Ah...relaxing.

2. While you're at work, you lock most of your neat shit up. Some of us have offices, some don't. But private or not there's usually a credenza or file cabinet of some kind with lock to keep out the thieving bastards that always lurk around looking through all your neat stuff. Don't think so? Set up a webcam with a motion sensor just for kicks. You'll be shocked at who comes peeking through your pencil drawer when you ain't around. Anyhow, now you have it all in moving boxes...*unlockable* moving boxes. And heaven forbid if you labled them...so don't. Now all your stuff is boxed up and easily 'movable'....or 'shopable' as the case may be. Just kind of makes me nervous in a generally distrusting sort of way, ya know?

3. Let's say your work group has a lab of some kind. Computer Lab, Genetic Testing Lab, Perfume Reverse Engineering Lab, Cosmetics For Rabbits Allergic Reaction Lab...whatever. If you don't want every friggin nice piece of equipment missing, gutted, broken, dropped or generally buggered in an annoyingly intermittent sort of way, you'd better pack all that stuff up yourself, or else. In these days of 'economic distress', there's no telling HOW little the dude who's in charge of moving your huge mound of expensive crap is getting paid per hour. And you can bet your ass he's got a latent mutant ability that will turn a million dollar scanning-tunneling electron microscope into the world's heaviest 'machine that goes "ping", then bursts in to flames' faster than the deviled eggs disappear at a family bar-b-que. Count on it.

4. You WILL be given labels to put on your stuff. And they WILL have 15 different blanks to fill out. And all you'll be given is a 5 digit number that represents the global position of where your precious stuff will end up. And you can also bet that NOBODY will know how to fill out the damn thing correctly. "What does AREA mean? What do I put under BUILDING NUMBER? Do we even HAVE a building number?" And you'll have people point out to you, when you're half through labeling your stuff, that *they* filled out their labels differently. But they won't *tell* you that their way is correct. Oh no, that would imply responsibility on their part. No they were just telling you that to instill a vague sense of insecurity about how you interpreted this shipping fiasco. Tell them to go play in the street. They may not, but chances are they'll shut up and leave you alone.

5. On the day before the day before the move, someone will ask you if you want to move early. Well, strike that, they won't actually ask YOU...but someone in your group. I can only hope for your sake that you work with the kind of people I do who can 'Just Say No' and not change the schedule 38 seconds from zero hour.

And all this is BEFORE you move. I'll get into my list of AFTER once I feel it's worth writing about. Unpacking is always far more painful than the opposite. Except with explosives.