I’m surprised neither of us got sick from our experience of that weekend working on a cold and damp night.
Our furniture arrived today. I rang Wridgways in the morning to find out what was happening; I wanted to get a delivery date. They said they’d been trying to contact me all day yesterday. That’s probably true, as I wasn’t at work. Though I was surprised when they said they didn’t know where to deliver our stuff. Almost every box had my address on it. I wonder why they didn’t try me on my mobile.
The truck arrived just before 11.00am and they were gone by 3.00pm, and afterwards the house looked like a warehouse inside and out by the time they had finished. There was stuff everywhere. Boxes had been stacked two or three deep and two high. S fed the men up on pies and beer. This is probably always a good thing to do. It may have led to them leaving lots of large plastic bags to cover our stuff that was left on the front veranda. These people work hard and a little kindness can go a long way. The veranda tends to get wet in the rain and the plastic covers were welcome. The Canberra Wridgways people were excellent (good on you, guys); unlike our Melbourne experience with Wridgways.
A few damages were evident. I have two wooden crates. I spotted one of the crates had been stored on its side. I hope it wasn’t the one I had marked ‘stereo and computer’. Some of the removalist boxes were badly squashed. While they were unloading and before everything had been removed I had a look inside the truck to see how things had been packed. Some boxes were squashed in sideways. I spotted one upside down.
We have an old copper which got damaged, and was squashed out of shape in the shift. I think I spotted the location on the truck where the copper had been packed. I noticed an almost perfectly circular space between several cartons on the truck. It was probably the copper that had been rammed into the gap, deforming the boxes into the shape of a circle, and damaging the copper in the process by squashing its sides. That’s not particularly clever packing.
Anyway, it was darn nice to be able to sit in an actual lounge chair, and turn the telly on. Normality had begun. That is, amidst the chaos of stacks and stacks of removalist boxes.
The image at the top is from a corner of our Warrandyte garden
Blog Archive
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2008
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Jul
(14)
- A $90,000 loose end tidied up
- A large cheque deposit
- Canberra to Melbourne
- Clearing out of Warrandyte
- Finally cleared out from Warrandyte
- Melbourne to Canberra
- The furniture arrives
- Canberra to Melbourne
- Our last pickup
- Melbourne to Canberra
- Cruise control
- The previous owner
- Some reflections on the move
- Packing tips
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Jul
(14)
About Me
- RoZ
- I was relatively content working as a public servant and then along came a restructure at work. I decided to take the money and run, and expected to get back into the workforce, pretty much straight away. As it turned out I was out of work for more than a year, and when it came along it was interstate. I thought I would pass on my experiences and impressions in the hope they might help others.
1 comment:
What an unfortunate experience. I must admit, I have moved overseas twice and back to Asia in the last decade or so without too many dramas. My greatest concern was always the fact that my belongings would arrive safely, even though I had transit insurance. I recently had an opportunity to interview the quality manager for a removalists company Crown Relocations. I am writing an article on removalists and quality improvement processes. I was surprised to learn that they have a global quality program that they use for continuous improvement. The idea is that the same processes are in place from your point of origin through to your destination. There is a requirement to obtain feedback from the client within 3 days across a standard set of questions. The bottom line is that Crown look for trends at the local, interstate and international level for corrective action. The point is if a client is unhappy, the branches cannot hide from it as it is all recorded into a global database. They then have a defined period to get it right with the client and at the branch level in general. This is one area that I failed to ask questions on when I moved, I just assumed that the customer service would be OK. Your experience tells me otherwise and that before they sign up anyone who is moving using interstate or international removalists should ask about the customer service and quality processes and what the removalists will do for you if you are unhappy. Moving is expensive and traumatic enough without having to worry about cleaning up and whether your belongings will arrive safely.
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