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Now I know why they say that moving is one of the most stressful events in a person's life. What a nightmare!

Rather than waste too much of my own time and effort in the moving process, I hired a nice moving company to pack up the accumulated junk of 12 years residence in the one house, and move it to the new one.

When they came out to give me a quote, the movers agreed there was a lot of stuff (over 50 boxes of books alone) but said they could do the job for just ten times their normal fee :-)

An agreement was made, hands were shaken and we were all set to go.

Unfortunately, the movers were less than perfect.

Firstly, they sent two trucks and a trailer to carry all the stuff, but about three too-few men. As a result, I had to pitch in and help them -- and the last box wasn't loaded until after midnight. Even then they simply ignored a number of boxes that were sitting right behind the truck, some mats the contents of several shelves and other bits.

Then, in their eagerness to escape and get home, they flipped the trailer they were towing, less than two Kms down the road. What's more, they didn't even realise that the aforementioned trailer was now lying on its side almost blocking the road.

Since I was following up behind, I had to race ahead, pass, and flag down one of the trucks to tell them they were no longer towing a trailer.

Fortunately the trailer contained nothing breakable, but wait -- it gets worse!

On arriving at the new house the next day, the movers began to unload the boxes into the designated rooms. By ensuring that all the boxes containing kitchenware are placed in the kitchen, bed-linen is in the bedrooms, etc., the whole task of unpacking should be much easier.

However, after an hour or so of this, they decided that it was too slow and began simply dumping everything in the room nearest the door. Once that room was absolutely full to the roof so you couldn't enter, they moved onto the next room.

As a result, much of the important stuff I needed was right at the back of the first room, access to it blocked by a hundred very heavy boxes. The rest of it was "somewhere".

And to cap it all off, they even got tired of doing that so simply dumped the last few boxes (including some of my computers) outside without attempting to carry them in, before driving off so quickly that one of the workers had to sprint after the hastily departing vehicle.

And to top it all off, I still haven't found a box containing many of the cables, multi-way boxes and other items I need to set up my office properly -- maybe it's still on their truck.

So what do you do when you get such poor service?

Why you offer to become a reference of course. You say that you'd gladly allow your name and contact details to be used for the purpose of helping the company promote its services. But when other people call you to ask how you found the service -- you tell them the plain and simple facts :-)

But enough of this -- even though I'm sitting here with a jury-rigged computer I'm about to get back into the swing of things.

Oh, and here's a brickbat for Telecom: Where's the email they promised to send me that was to provide the information associated with my new Jetstream connection????

When I fired things up last night I used the really handy Vodafone GPRS modem and a laptop to check my email (big plug for Vodafone because they deserve it) and found that there was no info for me.

I'll tell you all about the hour or so I spent trying to get something as simple as a Telecom/XTRA ADSL connection running in tomorrow's column.

If any Aardvark readers want to share an opinion on today's column or add something, you're invited to chip in and have your say in The Aardvark Forums or, if you prefer, you can contact me directly.

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