The World is a Scary Place

I started bidding my move late this week, and I feel as though I've picked up a really normal-looking rock and found a roiling mass of nasty slimy things underneath. Let me 'splain.

I started off the process by poking around online, seeing what sort of companies were out there, national lines, local lines, blah blah. I did a few mover.com "instant estimate" forms to see how much crap I have (turns out I have a lot of crap -- way more than the usual studio. People don't read or own sofas in studios, as it turns out). Got a few emails back from van lines, asked a few questions, didn't put any deposits down, obviously. THANK GOD I DIDN'T. Because yesterday afternoon--after a day that was meant for research and instead ended up a whole lotta piddly nothings--I started digging deeper into movers, van lines, and consumer information.

Turns out everybody is trying to rob me.

I had my list of moving companies who had gotten in touch with me next to my laptop, and I found movingscam.com's "blacklist," which features moving companies who are fronts, who don't have the right licenses, who are complete scam artists. Most of them work online and 2/3 of the people who contacted me were on this list.

After patting myself on the back for not succumbing to any hard sells (and there were many), I poked through the site's message boards and found more tales of movers holding property hostage until more money is paid, lists and lists of back and forth between movers, victims, attorneys, and the site's host, who seems a very savvy person indeed. This site is a goldmine, but I was left a very nervous chiquita.

A few things I've learned that I didn't know before (my idiocy and naivete amaze even me):

1. You shouldn't plan an interstate move online; you need someone to come to your house and give you a bid after looking at your actual stuff.

2. As a subhead of #1, you should go with a company with local offices in or near your city.

3. You need binding contracts, or contracts that say "you will pay this much and no more" so that these hostage schemes won't happen.

4. It's illegal to offer a bid based on cubic feet--this is illegal for interstate moves because there's a great deal of room (ha!) for cheating. Movers can pack loose and make you pay a bundle. It has to be bid by weight, which is typically calculated 7 pounds by cubic foot, if I remember correctly.

5. Given the ASTONISHING EXPENSE of movers, you can also do one of those "you pack, we move" deals and hire loaders and unloaders for each leg of the move. I'm considering this, but because it's just me, it feels a little overwhelming. I'll probably bid them all and see what happens.

What really scares the pants off me is that I had a list of 30 movers by the end of the night, and all but 8 were crossed out by the end of my research. They're all around Baltimore, and all but one is affiliated with a big national company like Allied or Mayflower. There are some bad people out there, and they're mostly running moving companies.

This has been a public service announcement brought to you by the letters Uh and Oh.