Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes Read Online Free PDF Page A

that sometimes arises with professional movers is getting them to give you your furniture back once they put itin the van. This problem is especially serious if the driver, after he puts your stuff in his van, goes around and picks up several other households full of stuff, which he then has to drop off, usually in Zaire, before he can go to your new home. The solution to this problem is to do what savvy moving families have been doing for years:
hijack the truck
. Get a gun, and simply demand that the driver unload at your house first. Of course this means you’ll wind up with somebody else’s possessions, but it doesn’t really matter. You’ll never get them unpacked anyway.
MOVING YOURSELF
    The big advantage of moving yourself is that you get to rent a rental truck. Rental trucks are highly specialized vehicles that are not released for use by the general public until they have undergone an intensive “breaking-in” program of being used to carry violent cattle with severe intestinal disorders over roughterrain for a minimum of 1,700,000 miles without maintenance.

    These machines are capable of traveling the length of several football fields on a single tankful of gas, yet they boast the kind of cornering, braking, and acceleration characteristics normally associated with municipalstadiums. No question about it: Once you get behind the wheel of a rental truck, you’ll wonder what the sticky substance on the seat is. But before you’re ready to think about the truck, you need to go through all your possessions and make a serious futile effort to get rid of them. A key element in this effort is …
THE GARAGE SALE
    A garage sale is basically when strangers come to your house and examine your personal belongings with undisguised contempt.
    The first ones you’ll meet will be the garage sale Regulars. Garage sales are their lives. They’ll show up at your home early, generally about two days before the sale is scheduled to begin. The way they find out about it is, they use computers to examine satellite reconnaissance photographs of suburban neighborhoods for signs of incipient garage sale activity, such as people standing around arguing about how much to charge for a 1953 set of the
Encyclopedia
Britannica
that’s missing volume 18 (Saliva-Tapeworm).

    How do you price all those treasured personal belongings? The truth is, it doesn’t matter what you charge, because the Regulars aren’t going to pay it. These are people who do not own a single possession, including furniture, that they paid more than $2.50 for, and they are not about to change their policy for the likes of you.
    GARAGE SALE REGULAR (picking Up a Sale object): What’s this?
    YOU : That’s my grandmother’s brooch. It’stwenty-four-carat gold, it has eight flawless diamonds, and these are real pearls in the center here. It was presented to my grandmother personally by the King of England, whose crest is on the back.
    GARAGE SALE REGULAR : I’ll give you a dollar for it.
    The Regulars will quickly pick you clean of everything that anybody might want to buy, so when your sale actually gets under way, it will consist of people getting out of their cars, examining your possessions the way you might view an unexpected leech in your pasta, then asking you: “Is this it?” The only thing they’ll be interested in buying is anything on which you have carefully placed a large sign stating: NOT FOR SALE. They’ll walk up, read the sign carefully, then ask you: “Is this for sale?”
    It can make you feel vaguely inadequate, watching people reject your possessions. At least that’s how it affects me. I find myself wanting to please these people. I want to say, “If you don’t see what you like, we’ll order it!” But of course this tends to defeat thewhole purpose of the garage sale, so the best thing to do is just sit there grimly until the sale is over and you can throw everything away.
    Okay, now that we’ve cleared out some of the dead