urban campout

I've been continuing my transient "urban campout" status at our friend Heather's house all weekend, which has meant a very comfortable bed to sleep in.  We both like to sleep surrounded by pillows so it's working out well.

On Friday morning, I had just woken up and my phone started ringing.  The number showing was the number for my contact at the movers.  He called me often before the move just to confirm details so I didn't think too much of it at first.  It was after I answered that I realized that the last person you want to hear from when your stuff is in transit is the movers.  He informed me that the truck that was supposed to pick up our stuff from Chicago had broken down and wasn't able to be fixed and that our stuff wouldn't be picked up from here until the 8th.  Unfortunately, our stuff is due to arrive in Dallas on the 9th.  The way that this works is that because we don't have enough stuff to fill an entire 18-wheeler, our stuff has to be routed with several other shipments from Illinois to Texas.  It could possibly end up riding in several different trucks and routing through other cities, which is why it was scheduled to take two weeks.

I was a little (ok, a lot) perturbed because we could have had our stuff this entire week, it's basically been sitting in a storage unit in the Chicago suburbs all this time.  And also, if the moving company knew about this a week in advance, how come there wasn't enough time to fix the problem?  Adam spent the weekend in a wedding in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico so I was trying to deal with the logistics of this with the moving company, the relocation company and the HR rep at his new company.  Luckily, he was able to help me on his layover between flights, but I was still really stressed to be doing this at a time when he was out of the country.  We were told we'd be eligible for a delay claim but the amount of money per day is not what I think we deserve since we've already been without our stuff for so long.  Of course, with this being a holiday weekend, I knew we'd probably not hear from anyone or get any type of resolution to the problem until Tuesday.

Late in the afternoon on Friday, I heard back from the movers and the relocation company and there is an off chance that they would have been able to load our stuff on a different truck this weekend, depending on the size of the shipment already in the truck.  If it ended up making it on that truck, we'll still have everything in time for move in day, so my fingers are crossed that they were able to squeeze our stuff on.  Just as I figured, we won't know the outcome until Tuesday morning.

My urban campout has been great because I'm not sitting alone in the empty condo.  I've been distracted enough to not worry about the moving issues, although this morning I remembered that we have to buy a car on Tuesday.  AHHHH!