I sit here surrounded by furniture that is askew and boxes that are taped with a general sense of being overwhelmed and sad. Maybe it's exhaustion, maybe its the fact every time I turn around its someone telling me something else that needs to be done, but I seriously need a week at the beach surrounded by tan relaxed people and fruity drinks with umbrella's in them.
Let me recap the past few days to put some things in to prospective and to also educate you on the ethics of one company - Coast 2 Coast Movers. I pray to God you read this and learn from our misfortune.
Friday morning they arrive at our home in Mableton and begin packing our things, everything is going well and I'm impressed with the speed by which they can pack. A tractor trailer is parked in front of our house to load it up and take it to Augusta. Jack and I had assumed they would use panel trucks, that is what we would have used, so when I mentioned casually that i hope he can back that up in our new driveway I had no idea the drama that would follow.
Around 3pm on Friday after almost 1/2 of our property was in the tractor trailer a guy, a man I assume has some type of ownership in the company, Ben gives us a call to tell us it would be $1500 more dollars for them to actually get the stuff from the end of our driveway to the house. He blamed us for not telling him we had a long driveway... Let me tell you this so you understand 1) I'm sitting in my living room watching cars drive up and down the road so it's not all that long 2) He never before in our 3 weeks of negotiation mention the drive nor did he ask about it. We provided this man an address and just assumed he would get what he needed from that. Nor did we ever expect him to use a vehicle that couldn't get into people's driveways!
So this is 3pm on Friday with half our stuff in the truck and when my husband points out the items above the guy, Ben, says well - we can leave it at the end of the driveway and you can figure out how to get into your house. Not the correct response, especially we since we had already paid extra for the hoisting services required to get several larger pieces of our furniture into the loft area. So my husband negotiates a bit and gets him down to $650 - the entire time being so mad he is about to call the police. He calls his boss who agrees to pay the $650 despite the fact that the quote we had received before was "binding".
We had a cashiers check for the agreed upon $5,850 and Ben told us we could give him a personal check the next day and they would go cash it before the banks closed. Like we are going to take the man's unearned $650.
Time trucks on and they don't end up completing the load on the first day - they do however break a microwave and grind mud all into my downstairs carpet. At which point things turned a bit ugly and they decided to pick it back up in the AM. I'm glad they stopped because everyone was tired and ill, but this left us frantically trying to figure out a place to stay. Luckily Jack's Mom and StepDad only live 45 minutes away and we were able to invade their home at 11 pm at night. Thank God for family.
The second day they show up at 8 AM and begin loading the remainder of the stuff. They say a carpet cleaner is on the way and they will fix the microwave for us... all is good. They are throwing boxes out of the attic, boxes they didn't pack and have no idea what is in them - not so good. They broke several of my ornaments, but only 1 I have found so far that meant anything, however most of those boxes still sit unopened and I'm terrified what I will find. When my husband took the guy the broken ornaments he said "well packed like that they are going to break"... well Duh they were packed to sit in an attic not to have you throw them. They should have repacked them since we paid for "packing services"... but we continue on. Getting more and more upset by the moment.
The truck is loaded and we head to Augusta. It's now past 12 pm and all banks are closed - please remember they were supposed to have us packed on Friday and we were to be in Augusta first thing on Saturday.
We arrive in Augusta and give them the cashiers check for the $5,850 and the personal check for the $650 to which they respond "we will not accept a personal check" go get us the $650 in US Postal Money Order (on a Saturday at 2 pm) or Cash or we drive off with your stuff and charge you storage until you get us the money. Oh my goodness I thought my husband was going to hurt someone - he didn't instead he called the police. The company stopped loading and we waited for the police to arrive.
The police explained to us that despite the loads of emails showing the earlier binding quote and the fact they were holding several hundred thousands of dollars worth of stuff over $650 there was nothing he could do and left! You have to love how the law protects its citizens. I mean in my opinion that was theft by deception or something, but nope...
So while Jack finished chatting with the police I called "Ben" thinking I could talk some sense into the guy. After all I wasn't upset and figured two rational people could talk this through - boy was I mistaken. He accused us of being unethical and said we would "stop payment" on any check the minute he accepted it. Said we were liars and that were intent on sabotaging this move. To which I completely lost my cool man - I went off like I haven't in years and guess where it got me - no where. We did everything by the book with this company, negotiated up front, got it in writing, told them about every scenario we thought would impact their pricing and in the end still agreed to pay them more and we are unethical? Please explain this to me.
Thank God we still had a business checking account open so I could pull out the money from two accounts or we would have been completely screwed- there is a max you can pull out of one account per day using a debit card. So to make a long story shorter, I gave them cash, they unloaded our stuff (the copier hasn't been hoisted yet as agreed they would) and we sit here surrounded by boxes stressed to the max and trying to deal.
I want a fruity drink and will make it my lifes ambition to tell everyone I can possibly tell not to use the company Coast to Coast movers!
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