Okay, I am not mechanically inclined. I am not, what you might call a heavy lifter. With this in mind, I had quite the grand time today.

See, I had already moved most of the smaller and/or lighter things from my room yesterday afternoon. Mom had already turned the power on at the new apartment so only a few steps remained before I moved in.

Unfortunately, they pertained to the actual moving.

My aunt’s boyfriend, Craig, came by with his truck at 10:38 a.m. He was late, of course, but then again it is his truck I’m perusing.

The first tisk-task on the schedule was the couch in the upstairs sitting-room. And, trust me, it was no easy task. It measures six-and-a-half feet long, whereas we had a maximum five feet of clearance in the bedroom, and then even less heading around the hallway to the stairs. The other pieces (the matching chair, a dresser and a small desk) weren’t nearly as large, but were at least twice as heavy!

Fortunately, heavy wasn’t the problem, it was getting them downstairs. Yeah, you guessed it-it was when we got to the walk-up.

It was just after noon when Craig left that the fun was just getting started.

Well, you may have noticed I only mentioned carrying four pieces of furniture. Where was the rest? The previous tenant left a few things like a dining room set, but the bed, futon, and bookshelf-system had to be manually, yep manually, assembled.

Remember how I said I wasn’t mechanically inclined, well I proved it.

First up was the bed. Who in the fuck knew sliding five pieces of wood together could be so hard? I sure didn’t, lemme tell ya. I slid the last piece of frame into the headboard and, dammit if the footboard on the diagonal side wouldn’t pop out. I slide that into place, and the process repeated until the whole damn thing fell…on my foot.

Moving on to the futon, it took minutes to actually cut the thick tape off of the box, and it wasn’t even red. Then, yeah, the daunting task of actually getting it out of the box, what with the plastic legs getting caught on Styrofoam, the cushion and the other leg pieces. By the time the first leg piece was removed from the box, it had taken a thrashing.

After I got everything out of the box, I laid everything out. It was basically pre-assembled. All I had to do was screw it together with the enclosed ratchets. Simple… except the screws weren’t screwing in properly, and then after an eternity of turning/pushing I was finally finished.

I turned it over, and it fell apart in an almost harmonic series of clangs.

Up next was the small bookshelf; but quite frankly after three-and-a-half hours of this shit my head, arms, and feet hurt too much to even consider it. However, I took it upon myself to try and transfer the unregistered phone and cable lines from downstairs up to the apartment. Neither attempt was very successful, and I spent the entire time pacing endlessly from one Indian representative to the next until I thought my head would explode.

This is my end of the conversation: “I can’t give a phone number, because you haven’t setitup for me yet!”

Well, at least I have brand new customer accounts with new processing fees, installation charges and spending a full day waiting by the door for the guy to come hook everything up. Maybe, I should have just stuck with the bookshelf, huh guys?

P.S.: The reason the bed wasn’t staying together turned out to be because the frame was bent slightly. After a few days spent sleeping on a mattress set up on the floor, I was able to secure another bed that went together easily, and hasn’t fallen apart.