Things are happening so fast. I can't believe that Monday the movers are coming. Monday they're going to pack up everything and Tuesday they're going to actually move it out. The Navy has got its act together where movers are concerned. They hire movers who have the best ratings. Before they contracted the cheapest movers they could find. Trust me, Navy families paid for it.
Our very first move, when we moved from Virginia to New Orleans, our movers sucked with a capital SUCK. We were very naive about the whole thing. We figured they would wrap up any thing breakable and mark the box fragile. Uh, not what happened. It was only when we arrived in New Orleans and were unloading our things when we found out that breakables were simply wrapped in a piece of packing paper. They didn't even tape the paper shut. Thankfully, my grandmother's antique jewelry box and a vase my sister made me were just fine. A lot of other things were broken. Almost all of our furniture that had legs, had them broken off.
We tried to get the moving company/Navy to pay for the items but there was a lot of red tape and most of the things broken were handmade goods so therefore had no real value. A year later when Hurricane Katrina happened we got paid a lot of nontaxable money. Between FEMA and the per diem that the Navy was giving us because we were displaced for a few months, we were more than paid for anything we lost in our move. Plus we got to leave the hell hole that is New Orleans since I was pregnant and considered high risk. We figured it all worked out in the end.
Since moving to Tennessee we have had three base houses. The first one was so old that while I stepped out for ten minutes to go pick up Josh at work, the living room ceiling fell due to water damage. As in when you looked up, you could see the roof of the attic. The move went ok, but I think that's because they were just moving us across the street so it all happened in one day. Plus we fed our moving crew in the attempts of making them like us so they would take care of our stuff. Our second house had a leaky ceiling so it made us very nervous and we had Josh's command demand to the housing office to give us one of the newer base houses. We were given Chief's housing. That's three ranks higher than Josh's rank. The next move went good as well. I'm guessing because it was also done in one day and we had the same crew from before which we fed again.
My brother-in-law's friend used to be a mover and he would frequently move Navy families. He was known for stealing their things. A dryer here or a box of valuables there. He validated his theft with the explanation that, "The Navy pays for anything that's lost so I might as well take it and they'll get another one." What he didn't realize is that most of the time, the actual Navy member whose stuff was stolen, rarely gets their item back. If they do get compensated, it's hardly ever the entire price of their item. So I can't wait to meet my brother-in-law's friend when we move back home. I'm going to make sure I place my hands on his shoulders, look him in the eyes and knee him as hard as I can in the groin.