A Moving Experience : Sure, Packing Up Is Painful. But It’s the Resettling That’s Really Unsettling.
THE WORST PART OF moving isn’t moving. It’s the aftermath--all the institutional rigmarole you have to go through to reconnect with the planet. Gas, water, electricity, garbage, phone, newspapers, mail, cable--it’s enough to send Kafka screaming into the night.
Last fall, I moved from Santa Paula to Ventura, 10 miles west. I made the usual renter deposits and concessions--first, last, security, the rights to my next book and so forth--and began the reconnect ritual with a call to the local cable TV company to order service.
“You’ll have to come to our office and fill out an application,” the cable lady informed me.
You can order a sarong from India or buy a piece of General Electric by phone, but for cable TV in Ventura, you have to appear in person. This is supposed to be the age of convenience. You should have to appear in person only for haircuts and heart surgery.
I shrewdly figured that I could save money by ordering my cable with Lou. He owns the house I rent and occupies the upper level. One address, one cable fee, right? Together, we entered the cable office as smug as debutantes.
Fifteen minutes later, we were back on the street, Lou staring numbly at our receipts, trying to decipher a dizzying array of fees. Without subscribing to any premium services--no Showtime, no HBO, no Cinemax--we had surrendered $122.56. “Why do I feel like I’ve been raped?” Lou muttered.
We hadn’t fared well. “You both will need decoder boxes,” the cable lady said.
“Why is that?” Lou protested. “My TV is cable-ready. I used to get this same selection of channels in L.A. without a decoder box.”
“Every cable company is different,” she said. “With us, you need the decoder. If you like, we can rent you a remote control for it.”
“My TV already has remote,” Lou said.
“It won’t work with our decoder box. You’ll have to rent a special remote from us.”
We walked out grateful that we didn’t have to rent special televisions.
The telephone company was more progressive. I was able to order phone service by phone. A few weeks later, someone from Pacific Bell called to inform me that I was using my phone too much: “In a six-day period, you made calls totaling $238.82.”
“What is this, a joke?” I replied. “How about if you just send me a bill every month, and I send you a check?”
“If you continue to make toll calls at this rate,” the Pac man intoned, “your monthly bill will be around $1,000.”
Obviously, this was George Orwell calling from the ultimate area code.
“I’m a writer. . . . I work at home. . . . When I’m researching, I make a lot of calls,” I explained. “I paid General Telephone so much money last year that their annual report listed me as a fixed asset.”
“I understand,” the Pac man said, not without sympathy. “But I’m afraid this is our policy for new customers. We’re going to send you a special bill for the $238.82. It’s due in a week.”
A polite follow-up letter explained that Pacific Bell gets nervous when a new customer’s phone charges exceed $150. Hit $400, and it gets nervous again. And every time it gets nervous, it sends a bill. This is on top of the monthly bill. Touch enough tones, and you could get four bills between new moons.
The U.S. Postal Service is another force movers must reckon with. For some reason, my mail wasn’t finding its way to my new address, so I ambled on down to the post office to inquire why.
I’m sad to report that the image of mail carriers completing their appointed rounds through sleet and snow and dark of night belongs to a bygone era. The problem, I was told by a supervisor, was our curb-side mailbox. Invariably, a car is parked in front of it, so the carrier, without bothering to notify us, was boycotting our house. “The carrier has to be able to approach the mailbox from directly in front of the box,” the supervisor explained. “We don’t want ‘em reaching in blind. Never know what sort of hazard might be in there.”
“How often do carriers encounter hazards in mailboxes?” I asked.
The supervisor shrugged. “Not very often.”
My father, in his venerable wisdom, had a different view of the matter. “They just don’t like having to get out of their trucks and walk 5 feet to the curb,” he scoffed.
“I guess they’re on to the notion that time is money,” I offered.
“Hell,” my father groused, “why don’t they just drive down the street without stopping at all? Just keep the mail in the truck. That would save a lot of time.”
The disheartening aspect of all these movers’ miseries is that they involve monopolies. If you don’t like your local phone or cable company or your mail service, what are you going to do, threaten to take your business elsewhere?
It was with a liberating sense of control, then, that I attended to a banking matter. In dealing with a bank, I feel that I have at least a modicum of free-enterprise leverage. I strode purposefully into the branch of my bank closest to my new abode and approached a young man at a teller’s window who was eager to be of service.
“My account is at the branch on the other side of town,” I explained. “But I’ve just moved to this neighborhood, so I’ll be conducting my transactions at this office.”
“No problem!”
“Would there be any advantage to actually moving my account to this office?”
After a moment of serious contemplation, he replied, “Well, it’s closer.”
There was nothing in his tone or expression to indicate that he was trying for humor.
I returned home to discover that the mail carrier, somehow managing to prevail against automotive impediments, had anointed my box with a solitary piece of mail.
A bill from Pacific Bell.
I was moved.
