My husband had five duty stations in his first five years of being in the Army. I thought we were PCS pros. Moreover, nothing had ever gotten lost and nothing really had ever been damaged … at least nothing worth filing a claim over: one wooden sewing box here and one drawer knob there. Our overseas PCS didn’t go entirely smoothly — our belongings took three months to get delivered on both ends of the tour — but nothing was lost or damaged. I didn’t see what all the PCS fuss was about.
Until this last move.
At this point, my husband was TDY in another state. He planned to come home and clear post in a week and we’d take off. We also had an 18-month-old, an age where the child is old enough to run around and get into everything but not old enough to want to sit still and watch TV. We had planned for my mother to fly out to entertain our daughter while the movers were at the house, and then my mother would drive our second car halfway across the country for us so we could travel as a family in one car with our kid and dog. We had it all worked out.
Until Murphy decided to accompany us on this particular PCS.
Two weeks before our PCS, my brother was rushed to the emergency room and was about one heartbeat from dying. My mom couldn’t very well leave his side just to help make our PCS run more smoothly. In addition to being emotionally stressful for me, this event also left us out of luck on the plane ticket we’d bought my mom and up a creek with what to do with our second car.
And I learned I’d miscarried our baby the same day. Which led to complications. Which led to me having to have an emergency D&C two days before the movers came to pack out our house. While my husband was clearing post. And arranging to sell our second car so we didn’t have to drive separately.
So .. .we call a friend and beg for some babysitting while I’m in surgery, and my husband drops me off at the hospital and goes to finish getting signatures on his clearing papers and to get an offer from CarMax.
I tell you all of this to let you know my frame of mind once the movers came: it was a big fat case of I Don’t Care. I don’t care how you pack anything, I don’t care what scratches you say are already on my dresser, I don’t care what you label that box.
I don’t care. Just get us out of here.
What could possibly go wrong?
So, apparently our first five PCSes were anomalies. Loads of things went wrong this time, we discovered when we started unpacking on this end.
They broke our bed but didn’t want to pay for it because they had written it was already broken. Well, we had a complete bed frame at the old house and now we have a mattress on the floor, so I’d say something happened in transit. I also discovered odd entries in the log of items, such as “white thing” and “bagged thing.” Ugh, what a pain to figure out what those were and try to figure out if they were missing. Lots of the little stickers the movers use had come unglued in transit, so many boxes didn’t have stickers. Plus, several boxes were just missing, including our TV, our surround sound system, and a box of 100 DVDs. Hmmm, seems like someone who works in the warehouse wanted to have a movie night.
Six months later, it’s mostly been ironed out. They “found” our TV (it still seems fishy to me), paid us for the surround sound, gypped us on the bed but paid for a broken desk I didn’t care about so that basically evened out, and we’re still negotiating over their lowball offer on our box of DVDs.
And what I learned from my fifth PCS is this: Even if you’re in surgery, even if your kid is driving you nuts, even if your husband is nowhere to be found, even if your brother is fighting for his life in a hospital … you still ought to care about your PCS.
I should’ve followed the movers around and looked at the ridiculous things they were writing on that list. I should’ve taken more photos of our belongings. Thank heavens a few weeks before we were leaving, I lazily snapped some photos of the DVD shelf just in case. That “just in case” was worth a thousand dollars. Too bad I didn’t do the same thing of my closet because an entire box of sweaters went missing, and it’s like they deliberately lost the most expensive sweaters I owned.
I should’ve documented more and been much more vigilant, but we’d had so many easy PCSes, and our movers were so friendly and nice, and my life was so chaotic that week that I just blew it off and assumed everything would be fine.
So, note to self: don’t make that mistake again on your sixth PCS. Post-surgery or not, I will be hovering over those movers like a shadow. I will buy them pizza … and then nitpick every little thing they do.
But heavens, I hope our sixth PCS doesn’t have as much Murphy as the fifth one did!
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After reading this, I quail at the thought of having to remember how to PCS after being in one place for so long — it'll be almost five years by the time the next set of orders rolls around. It doesn't help that the Law of Expanding Crap has encouraged our furniture collection to grow significantly beyond the newlywed levels of our earlier moves. We probably won't move for about a year yet, but maybe I'd better start on that household inventory now…
@ To the Nth,
Taking inventory is a great start, in fact it will help you and your spouse to look over everything and deice what you really need. In fact I would go so far as to see if any of it can be donated or if it is not worth the effort to hold on to it. Now for my wife and I we held on to a lot of things but we are now at our final duty station and we have really purged our stuff. Of course we keep pictures and have only one box of our sons baby clothes, at one time we had 13 boxes…LOL!!!
If you have children this will be a good time to get rid of all the toys that have not seen the light of day for months. We would tell our son that if he donated 10 toys we would get him two new toys. I know it sounds like bribery but it does get them involved with the process as well.
The sooner you start the easier it will be, prior planning leads equals a smooth and easier PCS.
v/r Al D'Adda
Wow only had one PCS but like your first ones it was a breeze! No issues at all. I really hope my streak doesent end lol
I'm so sorry you had such a rough time. We had something break on this most recent OCONUS PCS and let me tell you, that Army reporting site for the break, was a HEADACHE. It took literally hours and hours to get it to work. I can't imagine all you've been through to get as far as you have in getting reimbursed.
Don't beat yourself up. Under the circumstances, you did more than you could. I'm sorry you got ripped off. I always hovered in the background over our movers (but not so much as to be annoying and make them mad) and bought cokes, etc., and I really think that helped, but under your circumstances, you simply were not able to do all that.
Thank you. You know, the actual movers on both ends were pretty good. The people who boxed our stuff were super nice, and the people who unloaded were nice too. I think the major problem was in transit. We shared a truck with other families when it left our house, then it got unloaded and went into storage, then reloaded and delivered. I think that's where most of the problems happened. In the future, I would really try to do a door-to-door move to avoid all that in and out and back and forth of our boxes.
Sarah,
I'm sorry for your loss.
Regarding the box of DVDs, in the future consider getting one of those CD binder case things. It cuts down on space (the cases can go in storage until you sell the DVDs or be recycled) and is easily portable. Next PCS your kid will be old enough to want to watch movies and having them transportable will be peace of mind for you and entertainment for your little one.
I did buy those binders once we got here! You're right, it will save a ton of space…and it can ride in our car with us instead of being boxed up in really conspicuous boxes that scream SENSITIVE ITEMS! My husband said they may as well slap on stickers that say STEAL THIS BOX! :)
My husband used to grumble at me at how "difficult" I make our moves. I document and take pictures of everything. I keep receipts for stuff I bought years ago. When the movers are packing, I watch everything that they do. If they mark a piece of my furniture as damaged, the first words out of my mouth are "show me where". This has worked for me and we didn't have a problem until our last move.
Our last move was an absolute nightmare. A number of things went missing, including my brand new bedroom set. I'm still not sure how that was even possible but I hope that whoever got it enjoyed it. In addition, about half of my boxes were crushed which made unpacking interesting to say the least. Because I made our move so "difficult" we were able to get full reimbursement for everything.
We're moving overseas this summer and my husband has started asking me when and how we start to preparing our house for our move. He has stopped grumbling and now wants to help to make sure everything is covered. :)
We had movers move our stuff out of storage when we got a house on post (hubby's was deployed at the time, otherwise I would have done it myself). They broke our couch and refused to pay for it because I initialed that I didn't see any damage to it when they dropped it off…well they brought it in and tossed it in the living room, without the legs attached, so I put them on after they unloaded everything and I got my 2 little boys down for a nap…needless to say, pay attention and inspect everything!!!
Oops, I meant to say that While I was putting the legs on the couch, I realized they broke the frame of our couch, but due to the madness going on in our house while they were moving stuff in, I wasn't able to give the proper attention to what they were doing. It was a costly mistake for sure!
Our last PCS the packers were late getting to the house, packed one room and then took off for a 90 minute lunch. When they came back they REEKED of pot. They packed stuff with batteries still in it, lamps with light bulbs still in them, and ran out of boxes because it was so disorganized. They were at our house for 15 hours. We didn't have anything different from our prior PCS that was packed by 2 fewer people in 8 hours (no new furniture, etc). When they came to load the next day it was just as bad. We were leaving Colorado and they sent the three oldest, most out of shape, overweight movers I've even seen. They took 15 minute breaks every 20 minutes. When we got to our destination our stuff had to go in storage for 2 weeks. In that time 3 boxes disappeared and two tackle boxes (one full of scrapbook tools, I bet whoever took that was unpleasantly surprised!). Tons of stuff was broken and damaged, some of it as we watched them unload it. Thankfully our next move will be the last one home!
I really agree the process is frustrating. We also ended up with another family's dining room chair, and I really didn't want to entrust the movers to handle it. I wanted to try to track down the family myself…because I knew how crushed I would be to have one missing chair. The moving company doesn't care: they reimburse you the money and don't care that you now have an odd number of chairs. I just don't know where our stuff went…like the box of sweaters, I would MUCH rather have the box back than the money. Wouldn't it be cheaper for them to try to find people's stuff instead of just shelling out money all the time?