I've been out of commission for a few days. Not for my usual reasons of depression, confusion, or migraine due to some strange prescription drug cocktail overdose allergic reaction, but for something much, much worse.
Kori and I moved.
I hate moving. It's something that seems to be fated to happen only during periods of extreme weather conditions, or when you've sprained your ankle, or when something good comes on TV, or when the neighbors are making Stove Top Stuffing, or any other time when hauling gigantic pieces of ugly furniture in and out of dusty moving trucks in the middle of an unscheduled tornado would be inconvenient. The end result is often very pleasant - our new apartment, for example, has hot water - but the effort of moving your life from one place to another is just draining. Your legs turn to noodles from all the lifting, and I don't mean somewhat firm "al dente" noodles, but something more like those soggy noodles that were in the canned Chef Boyardee spaghetti that your mom fed you when you were young and which made you volcano barf like a frat boy after a keg stand.
That aside, there was one fabulous event that occurred three days ago which I never would have experienced had it not been for the move. My view of the universe changed completely in a period of several seconds, and I owe it all to U-Haul (for those of my readers who live in countries that have adopted the metric system (i.e. - anybody but us), U-Haul is an American company which rents out moving trucks to idiots who think that they'll save a few bucks by scraping, dinging, and otherwise destroying everything they own rather than paying some escaped prisoners to destroy furniture for them (although the furniture winds up getting destroyed in either scenario, the escaped prisoners probably have moving insurance and will pay you to cover any damages incurred during the move (they might send thugs over to your new digs later to rough you up for having made use of the insurance, but that's another matter))).
Like other great discoveries, it happened as the result of a mistake: penicillin, lite beer, and "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" were all discovered by people who slipped up during normal work routines. Somebody trips on a cord, the computer is unplugged during some intense calculations, atoms are split, protons are rethingamajigged, and we suddenly have Splenda which makes the entire stupid Atkins craze possible, leading to overly sweet soda pop and peanut butter cups that, although very much like the "real" thing, give you Mega-Diarrhea. You get the idea.
The slip up in this case is that I reserved a 14 foot moving truck with U-Haul, but was given a 10 footer by mistake. I was being helped by a slender hick of a customer representative when I noticed the error. He seemed like a simple guy. Maybe the sort of person who goes home, sits on a porch swing, chews on long grass, and says "yup" a lot while drinking beer that looks like water and tastes like monkey urine. It wasn't initially his intent to deceive me, but his goals quickly changed when he realized that getting me a truck of the proper size, which is to say of the size that I bloody well ordered, would have meant doing more paperwork, so he decided to try and lie his way out of it.
He paused for a moment to consider the possibilities. I could see by his expression that the gears were really turning upstairs. Having to redo the order would mean that he would get home later, which would mean possibly missing part of his favorite pro wrestling show on pay per view, and that he would also have less time to consume the swill he calls beer which is made from "pure Rocky Mountain water" (and little else, apparently).
He looked at the truck, and then he looked at me.
He looked at the truck again.
And then me again. His face took a solemn look.
He spoke.
"Well, it's bigger on the inside."
Well I'll be damned, I thought. Here I was, thinking that the truck was going to be too small for my move, but no! It's bigger on the inside! Of course! That makes perfect sense. I mean, I used to watch "Dr. Who," and I remember the Tardis, which was a telephone booth on the outside, but a cavernous transportation device on the inside. Obviously, Stephen Hawking, or some other physics brainiac, is working for U-Haul and outfitting the trucks with parts modeled after bits of UFOs that crashed in New Mexico deserts fifty years ago. I mean, DUH!
What do you say to someone like that? There are lies, and then there are L- I - E - S. He might as well have told me that the truck was immune to gravity and that, rather than traditional unleaded gasoline, the thing ran on pixie dust (which is probably cheaper than gas right now, anyway).
In the end, though, I took the small truck without making a fuss. Granted it was a bit smaller than the truck that I was expecting, but when someone comes along and brightens your day with a fantastic gem like that, you should just consider yourself lucky.
But I still hate moving.