T his past August, I moved back to Seattle from Orange County. An
ordeal for anyone, moving for me means shipping about 2,500 pieces of
vinyl and thrice as many CDs, which took about a week of long days to pack.
For this trip, I arranged for the Los Angeles moving company Eagle
Express to haul my belongings up from Costa Mesa, a decision that ranks
as my biggest regret of this—or maybe any—year.
Eagle Express’s supervisor, David Gomez, assured me that the
delivery would take two weeks max. In fact, it took almost a month, and
when the slack mothertruckers finally arrived at my Capitol Hill
storage facility, it was clear something had gone horribly awry:
Expecting around 60 boxes full of my music collection, there were
instead only 15.
One of the movers, Adam—who, I later discovered, was actually
an employee of West Coast Van Lines—initially expressed confusion
about the missing boxes. After much agitated questioning, he said he’d
had to unload some of his cargo due to weight issues. Incredulous, I
demanded he call Eagle Express to find out where my goods were. He made
a call, speaking to Gomez in Spanish; during the short conversation,
Adam became increasingly angry and then he hung up. Adam said something
vague about a warehouse in the L.A. area. I called Gomez but couldn’t
get a straight answer from him. Their stories weren’t jibing, and my
records were gone. I cursed Gomez in a vicious tone I hadn’t used since
George W. Bush became president in 2001.
I felt as if I’d gone in for a routine chiropractic visit and left
the office with three of my limbs amputated.
T hat’s the thing about collectors, according to Seattle
psychotherapist Gaelen Billingsley: “Many collectors feel synonymous
with the objects they collect and use them to derive or define a sense
of self. Though they may not have any objective value, objects
collected are seen as uniquely interesting or valuable to the
individual collector. Thus as collectors accumulate large numbers of
valuable items, they construct the sense that they, too, are valuable
by association, i.e., ‘The more of this great stuff I accumulate, the
more I matter.'”
Obsessive collecting, she explains, “tends to arise out of one (or a
combination) of the following three basic human needs: the need for a
personal self-
definition of worth, the need for a sense of life
purpose (or meaning), and the
desire for immortality.”
Damn, Ms. Billingsley. It’s like you peered directly into my
mind.
I’m as guilty of this dubious behavior as anyone. It’s neurotic. But
my excuses go far beyond the identity aggrandizing, the phallic
substitution and surrogate dick-waving. I actually do have legitimate
reasons for accumulating so many records: One is for DJing, which I’ve
done with some frequency on radio and in clubs since 1996 (and I will
always prefer to spin vinyl for such gigs). In fact, I had to turn down
a juicy DJ opportunity soon after I returned to Seattle because I
lacked the crucial weapons from my vinyl arsenal.
Another reason is research/reference. As a music journalist, I
regularly relied on my extensive library to help me to write reviews
and features. My collection also served as a resource for friends
looking to expand their knowledge. As I’ve told my friends many times,
my collection and my knowledge are here to be used. So, like Bill
Withers sang, use me. (Sadly, a huge music collection does not always
work as an aphrodisiac.) Fourthly, a megalomaniacal urge to know almost
everything about almost every worthwhile musician can be a
dangerous thing, I’ve discovered—especially when it comes time to
move. Fifthly, almost every record and CD has a complicated network of
memories and associations attached to it. Losing as many items as I did
feels like having several key scenes excised from my autobiography.
A s the weeks passed with no sighting of my precious cargo, I
became increasingly ill with anger and toxic vengefulness every time I
pondered Eagle Express’s botched job. For a while, I was phoning Gomez
every day, furious over my enormous loss (fuck a 401[k]; those records
were my pension!). When he did pick up, Gomez would profusely apologize
in heavily accented English and vow to try to find out what happened to
my stuff. Rinse, repeat, rage.
Over the next four months and dozens of (mostly unanswered) calls
and many empty promises later, I still can’t get a satisfactory
response from Gomez. At one point, Gomez said that Adam had tried to
escape into Canada to avoid the law on some charge, and that a truck
with my boxes was somewhere near the border. My calls to West Coast Van
Lines went unreturned.
I’ve pretty much resigned myself to never seeing those lost records
and CDs (and the dresser I’d owned since I was 9 and some other less
important items) again. Now I just want monetary compensation—and
Gomez’s head on a pike. Trouble is, I don’t know any lawyers in L.A.,
and even if I did, I have no stomach for dealing with them. And,
foolishly, I didn’t insure my belongings—after moving five times
in as many years without incident, I’d become complacent. (This, too,
ranks in the top five of my Regrets Hall of Shame.)
Y ou should have seen my friends’—especially fellow
collectors’—responses to my situation. Their faces would slacken
with a mixture of disgust and disbelief, and they’d gasp for a bit
until they could utter words of pity and consolation. It felt like I
was witnessing my own funeral every time I broke the news to
somebody.
After I told Jason Pettigrew, an ex–
Alternative
Press magazine coworker and fellow music obsessive, about my
travails, he said, “I would be getting background checks on the
individual movers and start brutally murdering their family members at
random.”
Obviously, a loss of this magnitude prompts much reflection (and
many nights spent dreaming of flying to L.A. to seek revenge). After
the shock, disbelief, and the barely suppressible rage had (mostly)
subsided, I began to ponder the significance of music—and its
physical manifestations—in my life. Maybe my obsession with it
wasn’t that healthy. Certainly, even after my moving disaster, I still
possess more recorded music than, oh, 97 percent of the population. I
am definitely not wanting for things to listen to. By any “normal”
standard, I owned way too many CDs and LPs.
And yet the knowledge of all those rare records (how will I
ever find those Bernard Parmegiani and M. Frog Labat LPs?) and
obscure, limited-edition CDs and boxed sets that I’d gathered over the
last 29 years and that are now dispersed to who knows where continues
to gnaw at me—every hour, every day. “Normal” is boring and
mediocre. I didn’t get where I am today—for better or
worse—through sensible moderation in my listening/collecting
habits. When music is your religion, as it is mine, losing reliquaries
of it can damage your soul and threaten your sanity.
Among the items missing from my collection: my entire stash of
hiphop vinyl and two-thirds of my hiphop CDs; all of my world-music CDs
(including 16 Fela Kuti and all of my Sublime Frequencies discs); all
of my highbrow, 20th-century composer stuff; my cherished Soul Jazz
Records CDs; my soundtracks; rare psych-rock LPs by Friendsound (the
LSD-inspired side project by some Paul Revere and the Raiders members);
little-known Kraut-rock classics by Exmagma and Et Cetera; Bernard
Szajner’s imaginary soundtrack to Dune done under the moniker
Zed; Kraftwerk’s first three amazing albums, all of which they
stubbornly, foolishly refuse to officially reissue; TONTO’s Expanding
Head Band’s Zero Time, with two separate covers; that sweet 100
Proof (Aged in Soul) LP on the Motown composers
Holland-Dozier-Holland’s Hot Wax label…. Someone could open a decent
music shop with those fugitive goods—and then promptly go out of
business.
Yes, I can get back a lot of the AWOL titles, provided I devote
considerable time and money to the endeavor. Hell, I’ve already begun
to replenish my collection as thriftily as possible. I’ve been rifling
through the used bins at Jive Time, Everyday Music, Wall of Sound,
Sonic Boom, and Easy Street with the kind of diligence that would
impress DJ Premier. Also, friends have come through with loans, burns,
MP3s, gifts, condolences, and sympathy.
Y ou’d think this would be the opportune time to switch to a
more digital approach to music consumption. It should be, but my analog
por vida attitude dies hard. I can’t help thinking that vinyl is
the ultimate musical format, with CDs second, and MP3s a distant third.
Daily, hourly, megabytes of great, obscure audio get uploaded to
YouTube, the torrent sites, and blogs like Mutant Sounds (mutant-sounds.blogspot.com).
And that’s great for everyone, except maybe for copyright holders. But
I’m not clever enough to DJ with a YouTube video, and torrent sites
often misidentify releases (which often sound shitty, anyway), and,
honestly, I don’t want to rip off musicians. That and the whole
physical-artifact factor: I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that the
gatefold double-LP version of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew will
always hold more allure and aesthetic value than that album reduced to
1s and 0s in an iPod.
That being said, I now have over 2,500 songs on my iTunes at work,
but they don’t seem like they’re mine so much as my
computer’s. And that somehow bothers me. Were some benefactor to
replace all of my missing songs on the planet’s biggest hard drive, I
would be grateful, but still would not feel as fulfilled as if I could
regain the actual releases. I’m firmly in the rearguard with regard to
Serato/iPod “upgrading,” and my tragedy hasn’t nudged me into the 21st
century. Not yet, anyway.
Besides, I’ve become addicted to the thrill of the hunt for music.
So much of my life’s been spent in record stores, digging through bins,
swapping info with clerks and fellow music nerds; to stop now would be
as hard as a lifelong smoker ditching his cigs in middle age.
So I continue to obsess over musical products, compulsively. While
most people in my circle scheme about getting drunk, high, laid, or by
with the least amount of effort, I spend my idle moments figuring out
the most efficient way to rebuild my shelves-full of Acid Mothers
Temple and Muslimgauze releases—and hundreds of other treasures
without which my life seems terribly diminished. Most (straight) guys
in my circle try to score pussy; I strive to re-score Pussy Galore’s
Sugarshit Sharp 12-inch (okay, and some pussy; I may be a geek,
but I have other needs, too).
If anything, my obsession with record collecting has only
intensified following this catastrophe. It’s as if I need to be
physically immersed not only in the sounds, but also in the vessels
from which they emanate. I crave the totems that announce to my
visitors (and the world) that my taste is impeccable. Sorry, but your
thousands of MP3s on your hard drive can’t compete with an entire room
jammed floor to ceiling with wax. Anybody can say he digs Nurse with
Wound; but if you show me a shelf in your pad groaning with their
releases, you’ve earned more respect in my eyes.
S cott Giampino—who books shows at Seattle supper club
the Triple Door and DJs soul, funk, and R&B under the name
Self-
Administered Beatdown—also recently lost the bulk of
his long-accruing collection. In 2004, his house burned to the ground,
and he and his family lost almost everything they owned. Giampino
estimates 2,500 out of 3,000 records were damaged in the blaze.
(Although he notes, “Oddly, virtually all the CDs in the house
survived. Irony!”)
Eventually, Giampino’s sense of loss diminished, so maybe there’s
hope for me. “I tried and still try to be rather ‘Zen’ about the entire
owning-objects thing now,” he says. I dunno: It’s hard to be Zen when I
want to get all Bruce Lee on the mugs responsible for decimating my
collection.
“My attitude has changed in the fact that I am much easier to let
things go,” Giampino observes. “I sell way more records now than I used
to. I used to hoard stuff, like any compulsive collector, but now I
have a much mellower attitude toward it. It’s twofold, with one part
being, ‘Hey, it’s just stuff, easy come easy go,’ and the other part
is, ‘Hey, if I really need this copy of “insert album title here,” I
can pony up the dough and buy it.’ I’ll find it again, the philosophy
being: Sure, I have to pay more, but it’s (usually) obtainable,
somewhere.”
I f anything positive has resulted from my tragic loss, it’s
that I’ve become more appreciative of what I do have now. While
I will agonize for years over several vanished gems, others will not be
mourned, as my memory’s not flawless. Hell, I’ve forgotten about
more music than most people have heard or will hear. That’s not
braggadocio, but simply factual reportage of an obsessive-compulsive
music critic’s life. It’s a curse wrapped up in a blessing.
Like many of my ilk, maybe I do view my collection as a bulwark
against mortality—or at least a tangible legacy of my existence
on earth. Forget leaving a good-looking corpse; I want my survivors to
gape in awe at shelf upon shelf, crate upon crate of my music
stash—a monument to monomania. It would be nice if they listened
to the things, too. 
I can only imagine how much this sucks for you. Once upon a time, I lost a few hundred albums (cassettes, actually) in transit – along with a motorcycle – when the truck carrying my stuff caught on fire & burned up. Even if you can’t recover everything, I hope you can make the moving company’s existence less profitable by suing the assholes into oblivion.
“When music is your religion”
This totally suuuuuucks. I wish you luck in re-finding all the rare items you lost.
That illustration isn’t very winning.
You really should be doing more about this. They have all the records (sorry) of who moved what. Just follow the chain of names and bear in mind that much of what they tell you will be a lie. Don’t stop until you get what you want.
SHOW THEM NO MERCY!
Dave, the enormity of your loss perhaps stunned you temporarily into inaction. And make no mistake, this is truly a profound loss that would strike deeply into anyone’s psyche. Of course the financial aspects of seeking a remedy could seem overwhelming as well. I am so glad to see you are now taking steps to recoup. Making the situation public was a good move.
I urge you not to give up on this. Pursue those MFer’s to the ends of the earth! As you mention, it was not only your personal collection but a precious resource for the community and even posterity.
How about a PayPal fund for Dave’s legal expenses? If every Stranger reader donated even $1….little enough payback for all the goodness the Stranger brings us each and every week. C’mon, ppl !
(Written by one who is attempting to jettison as many material objects as possible to “lighten the journey”.)
…even tho it’s “late” all authorities should be notified….. a lot of the work is already done…. you just email the article…
….police, border stations, FBI, all want any information they can get regarding crimes…. pieces are more likely to fall together if all involved have seen what you wrote…. you gotta do your part to assist the next victims….
I’m not sure where to start, but authorities usually ask, “Have you contacted ….?” Cosa Mesa (or whoever) Police should probably be first.
I don’t see this so much about records as moving companies, really…they’re horrible. In every way.
Also: the local used bins have been going my way lately.
Also also: let me know if you need a grip of boring ass 90s hiphop singles, any weak shit, and/or generally TEPID records…looking to lose half these thanks.
This year, some selfish asshole broke into my house and stole a half rack of Miller Lite and my music. ALL of it. The only comfort I have is knowing that the thief also got a fair amount of crap, (I’ve been buying cds since I was 11, it was bound to happen). Like you, some was salvaged by iTunes, but it’s not the same, (my iPod went missing, too). There’s nothing sexy about music that comes from a computer. Days go by and I don’t think about my losses and then some days, I want to kick things.
Thanks to some of my friends, I have started to rebuild my collection. Yes, there are precious, one of a kind discs that can never be replaced, but I’m trying to look at it with a fresh perspective. I’ve now been give the opportunity to create the ultimate, super collection. I will replace the blues, the punk, the classic rock and yes, I will replace Prince. I will replace Morrisey but not Alanis Morissette.
Regardless of this new perspective, there are days when I still imagine that dick kicking back with a Miller Lite and sorting through the soundtrack of my life. And then I remember that karma is a bitch. Those bastards will pay for their incompetence. Maybe Adam’s plan to seek refuge in Canada will be foiled and he will be forced to listen to nothing but Celine Dion for the rest of his days.
One can dream…
companies pay people minimum wage to deliver our precious items. They make a mint and the employees get fucked and so do we. I live music and my collection too, I fell for you bro. I hope it all works out and you get yuour collection back whole.
dude.. so sorry.. I know it sounds trite.. but I hope you reported to BBB
I was completely with you until you typed that evil phrase that denotes ignorant-fence-riding-internet-bloggers everywhere; you began a paragraph with “That being said.”
oh well
You come into this world naked and you leave naked.
I’d have to say the only reason this hasn’t been pursued from a legal angle is because (with regret that I must say this), this article is fabricated. No one who lost this much music would wait so long to take legal action of some kind…
Trix has the right idea. MP3’s may not be ideal but if you look past itunes there are sites out there that let you find what.cd you want in the digital format you want, including lossless formats like FLAC and ripped from vinyl. Sometimes even remastered so they are *better* quality than the original.
If you are worried about 1’s and 0’s not having as “warm a sound” or some other bs you had better ditch your cd’s because they are all digital too.
Jon: It happened.
I’ve been giving the movers a chance to retrieve the lost goods (as they promised they would), but my patience has run out and I’m now seeking legal recourse.
Aw, screw that, you can download everything you want, in whatever quality you want. Got 5000 lps and 5000 45s and I have barely touched them in 9 years since MP3 got big. Download FLAC if you dont want compression loss. Then backup your stuff to protect from ever losing stuff! Thanks for the tip on Friendsound! Had that Googled and downloaded before I got maybe two more paragraphs read!
No one gives a fuck about your stupid music collection. No one ever cared about any of that music, or you. Get over your fucking self.
Had to check this piece out b/c it’s displaced Savage Love at the top of the most comments list. No easy feat. So what’s all the talk ab? Dude. You still got your Willie Colon El Malo (w/ Hector Lavoe on vocals), right?! Those bastards are worse than looters after fall of Baghdad in ’03. Friendsound, no way?!
“Fifthly, almost every record and CD has a complicated network of memories and associations attached to it.”
This is the most pathetic thing I have ever read. Hipster materialism at its finest! Do you honestly expect anyone to care about you getting a bunch of stuff stolen? It happens all the time buddy.
You’ve waited too long to get your stuff back. 5 months now? You think it’s still sitting in boxes waiting to be found? Unlikely.
You needed to take savage, rip-roaring action immediately.
You needed to make their lives hell until they would rather commit suicide than talk to you on the phone.
You needed to make a barrage of calls and letters to all the people in their circle.
Too late now.
All you can hope for is $$$ compensation and you can be glad that you are freed from the burden of physical goods.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
a true crime against humanity.
my condolences.
julian calero
@Oinker
I love the Internet! See you in the Pink Palace!
i lost some of my rekkids moving back from nyc to seattle (note: all my sons moving in tukwilla – douchebags) and can feel the pain. email me and i will give you a record or two from my stuff. because i am feel the pain and loss.
sorry.
Dude………. I’ve had nightmares about this. Honestly. I had to move from Brisbane to Adelaide, and my first worry was all my vinyl warping in a hot shipping container. Luckily it was winter. My second bump came when I ticked the insurance option. I was told that I would have to itemise every single record, and they would “replace” them………. Obviously I advised them that if they would be able to find just 10% of my collection I would employ them full time to find the tracks I am looking for. In short, the message coming across as “they are irreplacable!”.
So, I bite the bullet & say that at the very least, considering I had to move no matter what, that I would agree to insure them for an agreed value……….. “No, sorry we can’t do that, we will only try to replace them”………. *ROAAAAAR!!*
In the 2 weeks it took for my records to make it back, I was waking up in a cold sweat panicing. It was a very stressfull & sleepless time for me to say the least.
Now I don’t mean to rain on your progress, but, in my opinion, you are trying to trick yourself into “letting go”. Just like if you lose a girlfriend you really love, and you try to block it out and not deal with it. In reality, people like us can’t change out souls that have been built over, in your case, almost 30 years.
It’s like they say, it takes half as long to get over someone, as the time you were together. In your case, 15 years…
Quick question, have you thought of employing a private investigating firm to look into it for you? Or lodge it with the authorities? It does sound criminal to me.
AntztA: I lodged a complaint with FMCSA. Somehow I’m not very optimistic this action will get my music back or even severely punish the movers. I’m also seeking a lawyer (if anyone reading this is a lawyer and wants to help, email me at dsegal@thestranger.com).
Much of the moving industry appears to be as corrupt as the worst government you can imagine.
Why would a lawyer want to help? You just “have no stomach for dealing” with lawyers. A moronic position if I’ve ever heard one. Even if all the money you manage to sue out of the movers ends up going to the lawyer, wouldn’t you rather give it to the lawyer than the people who stole your stuff. Jesus christ, after everything they’ve done to you, you’re siding with the thieves rather than heaven forbid a lawyer, who in this case is on your side. Thanks for continuing to make theft profitable.
If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
What is his phone number, Alex needs to get a few more calls.
David Gomez, Eagle Express Movers.
http://www.123movers.com/moving_service.…
Don’t give up hope! Another record collection/moving company horror story (from England), where the missing boxes were found(?) almost a full year later:
http://www.mustrad.org.uk/enth47.htm
Did they take the Surfin’ Bird record?
When I moved from Canada to the US, I had to get rid of EVERYTHING I OWNED. Everything.
And I don’t really feel bad about it. I, too, collected vinyl. Not as a DJ. But I’d started feeling like I was chained by it. I couldn’t really go anywhere without wondering how I could get it to where I was. FInally, I said “fuck it.”
I have enough crap now after 3 years. I will get rid of that stuff in a heartbeat. All I care about is my cat, my husband, and MAYBE a small yet valuable collection of antique Christmas ornaments.
We can’t all be perfect.
M Frog can be had –
trconnection.com/
Lost your M Frog, I may not sleep tonight
Reminds me a little, obliquely, of the traumatic life of fans of Doctor Who, whose entire beloved TV show was JUNKED by the BBC in the mid-70s. A lot of copies have turned up since but there are still hundreds of episodes that may not even exist any more because some douchebag sitting at a desk didn’t have the energy to care. At least with your music collection, the music itself is probably still out there somewhere. It’s a tiny bright side, but it’s something!
What percentage of their record collections do people with Massive Record Collections return to, I wonder? A while back I realised that I was accumulating Stuff at an alarming rate and that I’d be better off without the physical trappings, taking advantage of modern rental models instead. (Certainly it seems insane to me that anyone would own shelves and shelves of popular DVDs, but I know people who do.) The John-Cusack-in-High-Fidelity living space crammed with physical music is very cool, but I think it’s superficially cool – in the long run I’d rather have the sum of human artistic endeavor stored in a database the size of Switzerland, available to anyone for download at the touch of a computer key.
This is a terrible story about a terrible loss… oh wait. No it’s just another music snob douche asserting their superiority over the masses.
“I crave the totems that announce to my visitors (and the world) that my taste is impeccable.”
Fuck. You. You absolutely deserve what happened to you AND MORE because while you’re crying about your SUPER RARE AND REALLY REALLY AUTHENTIC records, people around the world were being gang-raped by soldiers in front of their families… Among other things.
I truly hope worse things than this continue to happen to you until you gain some fucking perspective.
Don’t let all the negative feed back get you down. Segal that story was frustrating but well written.
I don’t know you but my sympathies are with you.
hhffhc
dang. that’s shitty. i would cry if i lost all my vinyl. i did however, ironically lose my entire 10,000+ cd digital music collection last night. so i somewhat feel your pain.. keep collecting.
The Bait and Switch movers happened to my husband and I when moving cross country. The moving company I’d scheduled were not who showed up. The ones that did were subcontracted, cost twice as much and didn’t even have the correct dates and times of the move. The new movers showed a bit to much interest in my husbands coffin and records (luckily they arrived). Then when trying to call the agent I set it up with I never got a call returned. This was 4 years ago and it’s still a very sore subject. It’s like a bait and switch scheme that goes unregulated.
I feel for you Dave.
Hi I have a vinyl collection and I’m going to talk about it everytime I can. I also wear my sisters pants cause I like the way they feel around my package. I think that people that don’t own a Iphone, or have 1200 songs that they will never hear, are not real people. I like to go to shows and talk about other bands. I only buy organic, and smile as place my canvas bags in the back of my 08 prius. i’m the kid at the starbucks writing my novel on my mac book, while randomly checking myspace to see when the next transformers movie comes out. I love going to party’s and talking about my sneakers. I enjoy talking about politics when I’m drunk and smoking cigarrets cause my life is stressfull. I am a Seattle hipster and my music and clothes define me. I am as original as all the other2000 hipsters in the city.
(in no way related to this article, I am way more hip than that)
I completely and totally sympathize with your situation
I was the CJ at a large New Years party and my 80 gig Ipod was stolen. I dont drive, so my bus rides across town are now painfully long and unpleasant.
I had the same thing nearly happen to me and my 2000+ contemporary classical CDs (many of which are super rare or OOP) during my move from Delaware to Kansas City this fall. Same exact thing two week guarantee… yeah right. I moved on Sept. 11, didn’t see any of my stuff ’til Oct. 25. I was a wreck; here I was in a house with one suitcase, an air mattress, one suitcase, and two dogs (who of course had all of their belongings) for a month and a half. Oh also on the truck…my desktop computer which contained my soon-to-be-completed dissertation and all the scores I had written as an undergrad. Of course everything was backed up… but the back-up was on the truck as well. Luckily I did get all my BOXES back but all my large furniture was missing or destroyed. I feel for you man. It certainly is a loss of self. Your personal history has been exorcised from you in manners that would befit the Exorcist! Hang in there in there Linda Blair.
Holy shit.
My music collection (8,000-ish songs) is virtually all digital at this point, and thus theoretically easily replaceable, and I’d STILL be heartbroken to lose it. I can’t even imagine having my collection be on vinyl and then having a bunch of it be *gone* all of a sudden. That’s just nauseating.
Sorry, man.
Great article, whatever, dude lost his round thingies, all I got to say is: THAT ILLUSTRATION KICKS ASS!!!!!!!!!!
i am not sure which level of hell dante said they will be spending eternity, but i assure you they will not like it.
In 1997 I first had my VW van and everything I owned stolen from me in Atlanta. This included a large music collection, my sax, and all of my personal belongings as I was living out of the van working the Summer Olympics as a waiter. At first I was heartbroken and very lost but as time moved on I begin to see things in a different light. After walking back to the restaurant I worked at and asking to be let go that night I stumbled down the Greyhound station with everything I had left: my leather jacket, a pocket computer, my I.D., and the clothes on my back. Looking up at the Arrivals and Departures board I found myself standing at the crossroads of life with each of destinations leading to a different, unknown fate. But the thing I realized in that moment was that all of those roads really lead to the same place. Unencumbered from the weight of how I defined myself previously I was free to become anything I wanted to be. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.
I’ve traveled the world now and don’t spend most of my time collecting objects I know will never make me happy. I don’t think one can ever really own things anyway in a sense. It’s more like you just get to spend time being around them and worst yet, when you define yourself and your value by them, they end up owning you.
Wise words, laplapti.
“Were some benefactor to replace all of my missing songs on the planet’s biggest hard drive, I would be grateful”… along those lines, contact me (if you wish) – will-friedwald@nyc.rr.com
I would never allow ANYONE to move my music collection. That’s why they make U-Hauls!
I got screwed in much the same way. I hired a moving company to move my stuff from Massachusetts to California and it never showed up. The last thing I heard was that the driver decided that he needed to be paid first so he put everything into an anonymous storage facility and split (despite the fact that we’d paid thousands of dollars in advance).
I talked to a couple of lawyers who refused the case. They said that an interstate moving and trucking theft case was near impossible to win. They both told me to file an insurance claim and call it a lesson learned.
I’m still not sure what the lesson to be learned is but my advice to anyone moving precious cargo is to only use the absolute *best* moving company with the squeakiest clean reputation you can find. It just doesn’t pay to shop around based on price…