Letters From The Loft
Stuff From The Desk Of Chuck Thornton
October, 2009
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So where was I? Oh yeah...
As you might recall, back in Florida, we had shoved Sue's parents onto a plane, then waved bon voyage to all their earthly belongings before getting on a plane ourselves a couple of days later. Sue's folks were staying with her brother Kevin and his family in Orange County until we got everything squared away at their new apartment in Valencia. Once we were back in California, we checked in with them to see how their trip had been... after all, they hadn't flown in quite a while, and since then there have been all sorts of advances in airline security that we were sure they would appreciate. They told us that everything had went fine, although they were a bit taken aback when they got off the plane in Anaheim and, as senior citizens moving into the state, were immediately designated as part of an endangered species and tagged by the Department of Fish and Game.
Like I said, we had already lined up the apartment that they would be moving into. Below is a picture of the complex taken from its website.
If you reference the numbered part of the building as the southeast corner of the complex, the Currens' new apartment would be considered as located at the northwest corner. As you can see, there's a more horizontal sensibility to this place than with the Lakeland apartment building. It probably has about the same number of apartments, but in California, rather than stacking apartments, builders tend to smear them on the landscape like peanut butter on bread. Even so, the same problem exists at both locations: you just can't maneuver a mover's tractor/trailer combination into one of these places to unload furniture without converting bedrooms into patios. The parking area's just not wide enough for an 18-wheeler to negotiate.
After learning this lesson the hard way in Florida, I immediately called the moving company when we got back to Santa Clarita to arrange a practical delivery method. After drawing up numerous blueprints that would make Wile E. Coyote proud, the only viable approach I could come up with was to drop the stuff in via winch-equipped helicopter. Such ingenuity doesn't come cheap, though, and when the mover suggested a more mundane solution that didn't require me to crack an ATM machine or sell a kidney, I opted for practicality over flamboyance.
It turns out that what we needed (and what every apartment dweller needs if they want to take delivery of their furniture without ticking off the drivers and being added to the AFL-CIO's no-fly list) was "shuttle service" As a Southern Californian, the term "shuttle service" prompts an image of something you use when, for some insane reason, you have no access to your car and need transport from point A to... wherever your car is. It usually consists of squeezing into a van, bus or tram with a bunch of other auto-deprived losers and proving that the shortest distance between two points is strictly theoretical. But in the moving industry, "shuttle service" describes the process of driving the massive tractor/trailer that contains your furniture to a secret depot on the edge of town where they stash all the normal-sized U-Haul vans, and transferring your goods to one of those vans, which then makes the final incognito delivery to the destination apartment building with minimum drama.
So we made those arrangements, then immediately commenced waiting for the truck to arrive, which took about 10 days as it made its way from Florida to California via Nova Scotia.