August 3rd, 2008
But Why Do You Need Packers When You Are Giving Everything Away?
Question: But why do you need packers when you are giving everything away?
Answer: I’m moving to Washington DC for a year and I’m giving away almost everything I own to three five strangers.
Giving away my stuff, I have learned, is more, not less, work than moving it from one city to another or putting it in storage.
Moving, so far, has been a simple two step process –
- At the old house, I pack everything I need for two weeks into a bag or two to carry with myself and indiscriminately stuff everything else I own into boxes and load them into a truck.
- At the new house, I unload the boxes from the truck and transfer all my stuff straight into cupboards so that I don’t have to look at it again.
So far, I have never really had to worry about the stuff that’s in the boxes. I have never had to ask myself if I really needed it at all.
In every city I have stayed in, I have bought more stuff than I have discarded. As a result, every time I have moved, there is even more stuff in the boxes and even less incentive to sort through it.
This time, I need to sort through every single item I have acquired over the last ten years, to put them into three categories –
- Stuff I need to take with me (clothes/ accessories/ books/ gadgets/ important papers I can fit into three bags).
- Stuff I need to throw away (old papers/ other miscellaneous junk).
- Stuff I can give away (furniture/ furnishings/ electronics items/ kitchenware/ books/ DVDs/ knick-knacks).
The three people who are taking my things have already told me what they want. Others — both friends and strangers — keep dropping in to take the books/ DVDs/ knick-knacks that aren’t taken yet. So, there’s a constantly changing list of the stuff that I’m giving away, with additions as I sort through my stuff and find useful but forgotten things, and deletions as somebody asks for something.
By tomorrow evening, I have to sort through my stuff to identify what I’m taking with me and what I’m throwing away.
Then, I have to label whatever is left so the packers know if it is going to Alok/ Deepika in Thane, Preethi/ Gaurav in Chembur, Nandita in Pune or the orphanage in Madh.
The packers will be here on 5th and 6th to pack everything up and load it into two trucks — one each for Madh/ Thane and Chembur/ Pune — based on the route plan. On 7th, they’ll tell me how much it is going to cost me, after factoring in the octroi they have paid en route to Thane/ Pune.
It sounds like so much work that I haven’t even started so far — instead of sorting through my stuff, I have been researching the hipster subculture on the internet, for the last two days!
So, please don’t ask me again: but why do you need packers when you are giving everything away?
