canspice.org

I don’t know what it is about moving house, but it always seems to be more difficult than it should for us.

Our most-recent move has just finished. The hassles started with my favourite company in the world, Hawaiian Telcom. I had called them on August 21 to tell them that we were moving, and we would like service at our new house started on September 1. “Fine”, they said, “we’ll get it hooked up for you.” September 1 rolled around, Alice stayed home waiting for someone to show up. Three o’clock rolls around, nobody’s shown up. Alice calls me on her cell phone, I call Hawaiian Telcom, and they say to try the line in the house, because there’s some kind of “express dial tone” thing where they can hook it up over the phone.

Alice tries that, and the customer service rep says that they can’t hook up the line because there’s no line running to that house, and they’ll have to send out a technician on September 12.

Let me make that clear: Alice was talking on the phone that’s connected to the line running into our house. The customer service representative on the other end of this line running into our house said there’s no line running into our house.

Alice calls me back, I swear a bit, then I call Hawaiian Telcom. There was much “this is unacceptable” talk, especially given our previous experiences with Hawaiian Telcom. The CSR said that the actual reason why they couldn’t hook up the line was that there were two lines running to the property (there’s another house on our property), and inevitably they’d hook up the wrong one and have to send out a technician anyhow. That’s fair enough, I know how incompetent Hawaiian Telcom is. Amazingly enough the phone company cannot tell which line you’re using when you’re calling them on the line to be hooked up. You’d think they’d have that kind of power, being the phone company and all.

When I got home that evening I tried out the line by calling Alice’s cell phone. Miraculously, the line worked! I don’t know exactly how it got done, but it got done.

Then comes the cleaning of the old house. Because we have two cats we had to get the carpets professionally cleaned — not because the cats peed all over the carpets (which they didn’t), it was just in our lease. Our appointment was to be for ten o’clock on September 5. Ten-thirty comes along and Alice calls me — no carpet cleaners. I call the carpet cleaners and they say they’re trying to figure out where their truck is, and it’ll get sorted eventually, but would the 6th be okay to get the carpets cleaned? Again, I break out the “that’s unacceptable”, because we had to have the keys in to the property managers on the 5th. Eventually the truck’s tracked down and it’ll show up at the house at around 11:45, which it does.

Alice then calls me at a little after noon saying that the electric company came and shut off the electricity. Drove up, went to the electrical box on the pole beside the road, yelled “we’re shutting off the power”, shut off the power, and drove away.

This happened while the carpet cleaners were cleaning the carpets. They’d just sprayed down soap and were just about to do the cleaning, which requires water.

Problem: our old house is on catchment, and the pump runs off electricity. No electricity, no pump. No pump, no water.

You can see where this is leading.

I made frantic calls to the carpet cleaners’ office and our property manager trying to figure out what to do. Eventually we came to the conclusion that there was nothing to do and we had to reschedule for Friday. At this point I didn’t know that they’d already sprayed down soap, so I thought we were good to go.

Luckily for us (and the soap-laden carpets) our neighbours were home and let the carpet cleaners use their water. Alice bought them a box of chocolate-covered shortbread cookies as thanks.

Once, just once, I’d like to have a move go smoothly.