Who Is Incompetent?

So I have been chronicling some of the problems that have arisen relative to our moving company but those were pretty minor compared to the end of the day yesterday. The two young helpers were definitely hard workers and sped everything up so in the early afternoon the house itself was pretty much empty. It's the "pretty much" part that is the problem. We kept pointing out items that needed to be loaded, items that the packers had been looking at for two days already.

So when the foreman said he was ready to do the walk-through to make sure that the house, yard, and garage were empty, I already knew there were going to be problems. I had done a quick look around before that so I began to point out all the stuff that was still not packed on the truck. This included cookbooks, racks, and trays from the kitchen; mirrors, art, and photos from the master bedroom; our entire patio set and some large empty planters from the yard, and the real kicker was they had left this large Chinese rug (supposedly a gift from Sun Yat-Sen to my husband's grandfather but who knows) on the floor in the living room--the room that all of them had been traversing on their way to the front door and the truck.

It's incomprehensible to me that when one hires a moving company that company can tell you that you are just going to have to leave your goods behind. When the foreman said to my husband that it had obviously been a long time since he had been moved professionally, I was wondering where the professional behavior was.

The other alarm yesterday was when the house was finally, more or less, empty we let our three cats out of their large crate and the oldest one pushed open a window left ajar by the movers and went on a walkabout. My cats are entirely housebound cats with extremely limited experience in the broader world. We searched for three hours with no luck. Then, finally, just when I was about to give up entirely, I took an assortment of paper plates and cutlery next door to see if our neighbors wanted it for their cabin. Hiding in the bushes by their front door, totally traumatized and paralyzed, was my old cat Barney. The hovering tragedy was dissipated.