Armchair Anonymous: Moving

25:36Our instructors were there. Everybody knew each other very intimately. It didn't feel strange. And there's strength in numbers. You'll be with classmates in theory. Yeah. And my soon-to-be husband as well. He's like, this is a great opportunity for you. Kind of let me help you. You help me kind of thing. So about a month later, I got out of my lease for the condo and my husband and I pack up everything we own and we move into this house. And at the time, it was just myself, my fiance, and then my childhood best friend actually moved in with us. And was Kim still there? Kim is not there. It's a completely empty, beautiful home, no red flags.

26:10We spend all day moving in. There's no hiccups or anything. I would say we started around noon and then evening-ish, probably about seven or eight, we send most of our help home. We send the trucks home that are there. My husband goes to kind of clean up things at the old place. So I am then sitting in the home by myself kind of amongst all these boxes. And there is a big knock at the door and I go and I open it. And there is this tall woman standing there who is red faced, angry, very, very shook. And she goes, who the fuck are you? And what the fuck are you doing in my house? Oh, no. Was the house totally empty?

26:51Totally empty. Not a single thing in it. And I was like, hi, I'm Carly. I'm renting from Kim. She goes, I'm Kim. And this is my house. And you need to get the fuck out. Wait, what? Identity fraud? This is that was the ex-wife. They had the exact same name. Oh, okay. I had no idea. So she is who she says she is. And he says who he says he is. Okay. That's good. All right. That's better. Just a little bit of confusion there. And I'm like, holy crap, what am I supposed to do? So I've called my parents. I've called my husband. I've called lawyer Kim. I have my husband come back. I have my mom come back.

27:30This woman is standing outside and she is shaking. She's so angry. All of the neighbors have come out and are kind of like surrounding her. They're basically corroborating her story that this is her house. It's a really messy divorce. They mentioned to us that he actually lied to her about how old he was before they got married and said he was about 10 years younger than he actually was, that this was probably the third divorce and just kind of like, get the hell out right now kind of thing. The cops were called. So I'm on the phone with Kim and Kim says that he is on the way to the lake. He doesn't have enough keys for us, so he has to go get spare keys.

28:08This is a few hours away. He's not going to be able to be there. But to not worry, because he knows the law. The cops don't know anything. And I want you to tell the cops that everything's going to be fine. And actually, you can just tell them that I'll be living in the basement with my teenage son and you guys are actually just going to be my roommates. What? How does that make it better also? I don't know if it's because then he's the owner in the home. And then he goes, well, okay, what time did you move in? And I was like, I think around noon. He goes, great, I want you to stay until noon tomorrow.

28:40And then I'll come and we'll figure it all out. I'm like, well, the cops are here. And he's like, I don't care. It turns out he wanted us to stay for about 24 hours to get some sort of like squatters right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know the legalities of that, but he wanted us to stay put. and we were like, well, we need to get the hell out of here. I don't want to be in between whatever you guys have going on. But we have nowhere to go. Oh my God. So this is now about 10 o 'clock at night. It's about November. So it's dark outside. No snow yet, but cold. I call my parents and they're the heroes of this story.

29:13They unloaded their quads out of their quad trailer, cleaned it all out, and we moved our entire house into this quad trailer and literally packed up and left a few hours later. We ultimately went and moved in with them for a little while until we could save up for our first home. So they saved the day. Whoa. So that was his game plan from the very first speech. Honestly, this is preferred to what I thought was going on. My fear was he had rigged the house up with cameras. Oh, yeah. I thought this was going to be a perverse situation. I have a little more to tell you. Oh, wonderful. It's not going quite that direction.

29:50But the next couple of days, I go to my school, my department head, and explain everything that's gone on, how inappropriate. They're very understanding and say, like, he won't be rehired. And I think, great, it's handled. I get a message back a few days later and they say, you know what? It's November. He's supposed to be your instructor in January. We can't replace him in time. So he's going to be your law instructor for the next four months. And then we will fire him after that. Oh, my God. So I had to take his law class for the next four months. And I didn't learn a single thing about law from him.

30:24But he did constantly tell us that even if we didn't like him, if we ever were in trouble, that he would be the first person we would call. And truly, if I ever needed a really scummy lawyer that would do anything to get you out of something, I think he'd probably be my first call. Yeah. Wow. What kind of grade did he give you? Mid-80s. But I don't think I turned in work. I existed. He existed. There was no conversation. I would have given you an A just for having dealt with that. Yeah, I was nervous he was going to be punitive. You ratted him out. He's getting fired. I'm going to flunk you. The guy's already shown he doesn't have a tremendous amount of morals.

30:57No. And I actually called my mom to find out what her end of the story was. And she said that a few years after this, she got a phone call from a girlfriend who had used him as a divorce lawyer. And she didn't have much for cash and was worried about the price of things. And he was like, you know, you can just come with me to this party. There it is. Yeah, so I think pretty low branch. Oh, boy. I'm comforted a little bit that you have those folks up in Canada, too. I mean, I guess I think that kind of thing's a dime a dozen down here, but I am somewhat relieved that it's universal. You know, I decided to Google him before this just to kind of see his reviews.

31:35There's one that says, we bought a house from this person. We lived in it for a few months in the middle of winter. He called us and said that we had to move out because the house had too many liens on it. Oh, boy. I'm pretty sure that's like your whole job. Yeah. Another one says, if you want theft, corruption, perjury, document falsification, law violations, abuse, extortion, you've come to the right lawyer. I'm surprised he hasn't been disbarred. So squatters rights only take 24 hours. That is crazy. That's terrifying. That's like, what if you had a friend spent the night and they're just like, no, I live here now.

32:10I've been here 24 hours. I know. I don't know what he was going for, how that all works. I didn't learn anything in law, so. Yeah, wow. Oh, man. Thank God that your parents had the toy trailer. It worked out super well. And the sim was definitely simming with all of this because I actually hadn't even thought about this man in like well over a decade. I exchanged services with an esthetician every few weeks and she had moved into a new facility. And I went to go visit her and her and I listened to Armchair through these appointments. That's like our thing. We always book them on Fridays to try to listen.

32:43Oh, fun. I walked into her new building and his law office was across the hall. What? Oh, my God. That is, what? No. My heart sank. I haven't seen him yet. And I pray I don't. So I actually heard the prompt in her office across the hall and wrote my story in outside of his office. No, you're right. That's impossible. That's impossible. Is it on speaker? Like when you listen to this one, he might hear it. Oh, let's hope. You guys should put speakers in the hallway. I kind of hope so. but now when I walk by I like to like snub them a little bit. Oh my goodness. Wow. Oh Carly, what a bizarre story.

33:20I loved it. Thank you. Yeah, that was great. Thanks for sharing. Lots of twists and turns. Thank you so much. All right. Bye Carly. Have a good day guys. Bye.

33:45Here's Steph. Steph Curry? Maybe, yeah. Oh, let's see. Yes, Steph Curry! Hi, Steph. Hi. How are you? I'm well, so, so nervous. You have the cutest haircut. I love it. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Where are you? Physically, I'm in Silicon Valley right now. I live in San Francisco, close by. and that I guess opens up my story for you about the move from Toronto to San Francisco. I was born and raised in Toronto, had only ever lived in Toronto. It was a dream of mine and my husband's to move abroad, have an adventure and we were lucky enough to get an opportunity with my work to be internationally relocated to California.

34:29We'd never been to California before so kind of an interesting thing to just move somewhere you've never visited. Better weather, no Toronto winters sounded good. It was 2021. So it's still kind of pandemic-y. And so part of this like international relocation package that I got with work was that they would take care of everything, which is really great. So we had a team that came to our apartment in Toronto and they packed up everything we owned really carefully and meticulously and loaded the truck for us. And we had some lawyers help us put together all the paperwork that's required because that's very complex.

35:00Also, that's a fucking hell of a drive. That's got to be like 3000 miles. You would know better than me, probably. Well, Detroit's like 2400, 2600 and then Toronto. Yeah. So that's a lot. So the company was going to drive it to our new place in San Francisco. We just had to fly over. We've given notice at our apartment. We sold our cars. Everything we own is on this truck. We're like ready to move. And the first hurdle we have to overcome is the airport experience. So interesting to note the way that you apply for a work visa to go from Canada to the U.S. is you have to apply for the visa at the airport on the day that you're leaving.

35:36That sounds very dicey. Yes, because if you get denied, you've given up your whole life. And I asked multiple times, can I not go to an embassy before and do this application in advance to know that I'm approved to move? They said, no, you have to do it at the airport the day that you're flying to San Francisco to move. It's wild. I don't understand why it works that way. It's a very emotional experience. It's very stressful just making sure all of this is good. You know, they've backfilled my previous job. I've got this new job to look forward to. We've put down, you know, three months of security deposit on our new apartment in San Francisco that we've never seen before.

36:12Three months of security deposit in San Francisco is probably a year's worth of rent in Toronto. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so expensive there. Yeah, crazy. So there's so much on the line. We get to the airport about six hours early so that we have enough time to do this whole visa application process. But before you can get to the U.S. customs agents that are there that approve or deny you, you go through security. And so we've got two cats that we have to move with us. This is another thing I'm really stressed about. One of the cats is elderly and she's docile and fine. And then the younger cat is part feral.

36:46He's an outdoor cat. We didn't choose to adopt him. He just showed up one day and we were slowly integrating him into our family. But he's missing a chunk of his ear. He's like really rambunctious. He scratches a lot. So I'm trying to figure out how to get this cat through security. You have way too much on your plate. I just got to say. He can't go through with the carrier. You have to have the cat separate and then the carrier goes through the X-ray. Oh, that's a bad idea. That's a very bad idea. There's a lot of bad ideas at the airport. Yes. So I'm pre-planning how to make this happen. So I've brought this like mesh laundry basket to like put the cat into so the carrier can go through and then we like have to like switch the cat back and forth.

37:23I put an air tag on him so that if he runs away in the airport, like maybe we can find him. Who knows what's going to happen? Oh, my God. My nightmare to have a feral cat running loose in the airport. Oh, it's like a Disney movie. Yeah, that's true. An adventure. I didn't know this was going to happen, but they have this private room by security for these situations. So that was great. I didn't need to use the laundry basket. I think we ditched it somewhere along the way at the airport. So we go into the private room, let the cat out into the room. He's running around going crazy. They take the carrier out to scan the carrier.

37:57They bring it back. It's fine. We're good to go. I have to get him back in the carrier, which is really difficult. It scratches the hell out of my arms. Oh, my goodness. At least he's not lost at this point.

38:11So we've made it through security with the cats. I'm like very relieved. I've been super worried about this leading up to this day. And then we get to the customs area. And so we go up to the agent and we give them the paperwork. It's like three inches of paper in this folder that we got from the lawyers that they have to look through. And then they're going to determine whether we're approved or not. So we wait in the waiting area for an hour and a half with these two cats that are like yowling. And you're not allowed to use your cell phones here. You just have to sit really patiently and quietly.

38:40And we're watching the agents flip through the pages very slowly, but they're not even looking at them. They're just chatting with each other about how their weekend was. They have some snacks at the area. I guess they flip to the last one. Don't know how much they've read, but they call us up and they say, OK, you're approved. Go on in. OK, we're past security. We're approved. Our visas are good. I'm like ecstatic. I think we go get a celebratory drink. I think they just looked at you and they were like, they're white. So let's just go through this. I mean, probably. Let's pretend like we're looking at this.

39:13Yeah, but they're white. Privilege is definitely working in our favor in this scenario. So we get to San Francisco. It's like 11 p.m. at this point. Get to the car rental place. Pick up our car. I am so grateful that neither cat has had an accident by this point because we're 11 hours into them being in carriage. Oh, yeah. No one's peed. No one's done anything because I was like braced for having to clean up cat pee on a plane. Oh, do you give them like weed gummies or anything to get them to chill on the flight? Yes. And we did give some to the feral cat, but it wears off pretty quickly. And then they get more scared because now they're no longer on drugs, but they're on the plane.

39:49Should have coming off a drug. They're paranoid. Did it ever like jump up and down in the crate and cause a havoc? Yes, the whole time. So my husband's behind with the feral wine. He's going nuts for like the whole flight, losing his mind. He's sitting next to me. Oh my God. I've got the elderly cat and she's chill. She like pokes her little head out once in a while. She's looking around. We can't sit next to each other because they don't allow animals to be next to each other on a flight. We're picking up this rental car. It's taking forever to get the car. We're going to stay in a hotel while our goods are being driven across the continent.

40:22And then when they arrive, we can move into the apartment we've secured. So we're at the hotel. It's taking forever to check into the hotel. And the first thing I need to do is create a litter box for the cats because they have been holding it for so long. So I had packed in my checked luggage a whole bunch of litter and a box. So I open it up to like set this up. And they had gone through my luggage, I guess, checking things. And maybe the litter was a flag. They're like, what the heck is in this person's bag? And so they had broken the bag of litter that I had. And it was all of my luggage. Well, now you can just use your suitcase as the box, the litter box.

40:59True, but it's also everything that I have to live off of for the next four weeks. Oh, fuck. You guys really took it on. And I hope you like California. animal parents are really yeah they're good folks we do a lot for these these cats so we set up the litter box i deal with my luggage at some point later and all of my belongings covered in this litter and then we're kind of clocking that this hotel is not great it's a pet friendly hotel so it has a stink to it it's kind of grungy and we're like oh my god are we gonna be able to live here for the next like four weeks oh that long oh my god we're trying to make the most of it but this place is not good.

41:38One night we're sleeping and it's like three in the morning and I hear a noise and I feel something. I wake up and the elderly cat is in the middle of our bed, just peeing in between my husband and I. Because you have so much litter on your pajamas from the...

41:55I didn't even consider that. It's all in the sheets. We call down to the front desk. We let them know what's happened and they say, okay, bring the laundry down. We'll give you some new sheets, but you have to clean this up and deal with it. My husband takes the sheets down. They take them into the backstaff area. He has to put them into the commercial washing machine because they refuse to touch it. Fine. A little weird. And then we get the new sheets and then it's up to us to clean and make our bed. So I'm already like, what has previously happened on this mattress that other people did or did not clean?

42:26We flip it and put the new sheets on. So at this point, I'm like, we can't stay here. The cats are unhappy. It's too small of a space for them. So I call my boss and I let her know what's going on. And she's like, OK, I get it. We'll help you out. So they order rental furniture for us and they put it into the apartment that we've secured. Oh, great. Yeah, perfect. So we're so happy. We do that for a few weeks. And then it's the day that our stuff is supposed to come. The rental furniture company comes in the morning to take all of the furniture out right before the delivery company comes with all of our own belongings.

42:56The company that's going to move us in is supposed to unpack the truck, unpack every single box, put everything away for us, rebuild our furniture that they disassembled in Toronto. The whole nine yards is done in this one day. And they're supposed to come at like 9am. I'm so excited. Like I can't just wait to be situated and be in my home and like have my own bedsheets and all the things that I've missed. I've been through the most stressful time of my life, like international move. I'm starting a new job. I'm like meeting all these new people. It's still the pandemic kind of. Getting pissed on at nine.

43:27Yeah, this is a lot. they're supposed to come at nine they don't show up at nine it's 10 it's 11 they come just before lunchtime and i'm like already you're not going to get this work done like you have so much to do in a single day you're three hours late and then these two guys get out of the truck and i'm like oh my gosh there's only two people like how do you think this is going to work we also have in san francisco a lot of hills and stairs up to apartments so we have these like massive flight of stairs to get to our front door just doing that alone bringing the stuff up these stairs is going to kill these guys.

43:59I just have to trust the process. So they've been hired to do this job. They understand the scope. They got to do it. So there's like this younger guy and this older guy. And the older guy kind of seems like he's in charge, but it's not super clear. And my husband and I clocked that his fingers are super dirty. Like it looks like he's been working on his truck in some capacity, black and greasy. So they start to unload. And I'm like, do you guys have enough help to like get this done? They're like, oh, someone else is coming to help us. There's a third guy who's coming. He shows up, I guess, mid-afternoon.

44:30They're going at it, but there's no process here. There's like no one set to do certain jobs, no game plan at all. It's like they've never moved anyone ever before. Like they're randomly doing a couple of boxes, half unpacking something, nothing's going into the proper room. No furniture rebuilding is being done. So like, where are you going to put all the items that you're unpacking without the furniture in place? So my husband says to the older guy, hey, maybe could you start building the bed? We need a place to sleep tonight. He's like, okay, yep. Has a really hard time with it. A whole bunch of aesthetic damage is done.

45:02There's like a big scratch across the headboard. Like the screws are stripped. Somehow he puts it together. I don't know how stable it's going to be. And then he tries to do the wardrobe. Totally destroys the wardrobe. Unusable. Oh my God. Absolute garbage. And then also I'm noticing that these black sticky fingerprints are on every single item that we own. My bed frame is covered in these black fingerprints. And I noticed the other two guys, the younger guys, also have these like black fingerprints on everything. I guess there's like some newspaper that's been used to pack things, but no one's washing their hands.

45:36They're just like touching everything. And I think I cleaned off all my items for the following weeks. Like I would find them on stuff. It's really stressing me out. And then I go to the washroom and I notice there's urine all across the toilet seat. I'm like, well, that's pretty gross, but okay. Could have been your cat. He's got a bad track record. But I look over and not only is it on the toilet seat, there's a full puddle on the floor next to the toilet of urine. OK, so it was the older guy. That's a very older guy move. It is. Maybe that one was the cat at least on the floor. Yeah, there's piss everywhere.

46:10So I clean it up. I don't want to address it with them in the middle of this workday. That feels awkward. So I'm silently angry that now someone has peed on my floor. We keep going. And then I'm in the kitchen. My husband's in the kitchen. People are in the kitchen. I hear a clicking noise and I'm like, don't know what that is. And then I turn around and my husband is running from the stove to the sink with something that's on fire. I quickly realized that they have laid out the inventory paperwork on top of the gas stove, which has pilot lights lit. And so someone leaned on the hob in front of the stove and lit the paperwork on fire.

46:49and so my husband's put it out but now there's also melted plastic all over our stove because it was in plastic heating i'm like this is wild so my husband says to the older guy like hey your friend here just lit the paperwork on fire and the older guy doesn't care he's like oh yeah right and walks away you can see the smoke in here like what do you mean yeah right so i've had enough i'm like freaking out i call my boss i'm like i can't do this like i don't know what to do all of these things are going wrong. I can't handle this. And she's like, just tell them to leave stuff. And I'm like, oh, that's a good idea.

47:24And she's like, we'll figure something else out. We'll get another team in there to like help you with all the things like just tell them to leave. I try to find a way to say this, but I'm so emotional. I want to be polite, but I'm so out of time. I'm so stressed. I want to cry and scream at the same time. I'm like, it's too much. So eventually I'd find the words to be like, okay, you guys need to go. And they don't understand why I'm asking. Just look at me like I'm crazy. Like, but we're not done yet. Please just take everything out of the boxes. I want you to remove all the cardboard boxes because I don't want to deal with that.

48:02And then just go. We got it from here. That's it. So they just start dumping everything out of the boxes onto the floor and take all the cardboard boxes. This takes them a couple more hours. Oh, my God. This is as bad as it can go. How much was this service? Yeah, yeah. It's probably a fortune. So expensive. Drive across the continent? Oh, my God. It's dark when they finally leave, and our stuff is just in piles on the floor surrounding us. And my husband didn't have a work permit, so he had a little bit of time in the coming days to, like, build the furniture and put all the items back and everything.

48:38But it was a wild and stressful experience. Was there any refunding that happened? This is a good question. Yes, I was able to tell my company what they had damaged. Like my wardrobe was broken. They bought us a new one and charged it back to the moving company. Is this Google? This is a good company. Yeah, yeah. She's in Silicon Valley. Yeah, you're in that area. I like this. You deserve that. I actually don't work in tech. I work in retail. And it's very unique that I got an offer like this. Oh, cool. Well, good. I think you deserve it. I was thinking seven different times I would love to hire you.

49:12You're so meticulous and so forward thinking and so prepared. You have high standards. You're not like those movers. I appreciate that. I think my husband would agree with those sentiments. I'm a meticulous person. Wow. Now, the way I sometimes get through situations similar to that one is I have to go, well, fuck, I don't want that job. I mean, that's the only way I can kind of get through when I'm seeing abject incompetence and a lack of giving a fuck. I kind of go like, yeah, if I was changing oil here too, I might feel the same way. When you paid, it's hard. Yeah, but someone got the$15 ,000 and these guys got 200 bucks.

49:50Yeah, that's true. What a delight, Steph. You like California. It's been an experience of a lifetime. It's so interesting here. It's beautiful. It's very different than Toronto. It has made me appreciate Toronto in a lot of ways that I was taking for granted while I lived there. But San Francisco is amazing. I have incredible friends there. If I can shout out Peach, Adrian, Katie and my podcast club, they are wonderful people. You're in a podcast club. Yes, it's like a book club, but it's based on a podcast. And it was a health and wellness podcast, but a bunch of us are arm cherries. And so it has slowly turned into a lot of talk about arm chair stuff.

50:25We are so flattered to have infiltrated a health and wellness podcast club. well delightful meeting you Steph we're thrilled to have you here it's been amazing to meet you both thank you so much all right take care that visa thing is kind of well I will say in our defense I've had to do that to go to Canada to work and it's very similar they let you land there but you can't leave the airport and so the day I went there to work on a movie it was also the day all the visa students were arriving from around the world. And it was absolutely nuts. I was there for like a day trying to get this fucking work permit.

51:07And at one point it's like, I'm just going to say I'm not working. It's so easy. I'm just going to go in. I'm just here on vacation. Yeah, I'm here to fucking sightsee. Yeah, exactly. Deal with it. Oh, poor Steph. Poor Steph. I mean, look, I respect it so much, but man, just let that feral cat just be feral in the world. It's fun. We're having comparable thoughts. Mine is like, just buy new shit when you get there. These are fucking moving costs. I'm sure that was at least 15 grand. Just go buy some furniture. I know, but also like your special things. Yeah, FedEx those. All right, love you. All right, love you.

51:44Do you want to sing a tune or something? We don't have a theme song. Oh. Okay, great. We don't have a theme song for this new show. So here I go, go, go. We're gonna ask some random questions And with the help of Armchairies, we'll get some suggestions On the Flyer Rindish On the Flyer Rindish Enjoy

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