We needed a new sofa, so my wife found one going cheap on a Facebook group, and this evening she sent me out to collect it. We booked a van to pick it up and they asked what size. There are two sizes of van, 1.7m and 2.4m. So this conversation ensued:
And thus I sealed my own fate.
Lalamove is a pretty great service. Time was (three years ago when we last moved) you called a random bloke with a van with a number you got from who-knows-where and perhaps somebody turned up, and maybe they’d remembered to clear the junk/their wife and one year old child (I kid you not) out of the back of their van so you could fit a bookcase inside. Now, we can just go on the internet, tell a computer that we need a man with a van to meet us somewhere, and then have half an hour of effing and blinding because no taxi driver deigns to stop and take you to the same destination.
Eventually, nauseated by the route my taxi had taken (every bendy road in Singapore, twice) I arrived at my destination, to find two men failing to stuff a large sofa into a small van. Because the sofa is 1.8m long, and what kind of idiot would think that all vehicles are the same length, but some are different heights to others?
The driver was very good about this, and left without charging me for my incompetence. Then I booked another van, which sadly couldn’t come immediately, so I have half an hour to recline on my new sofa (the previous owners have gone off to do their own thing) and recover from today.
The kids came in and woke us about 6 this morning. If that wasn’t enough, I have shooting pains down my arms from all the carrying, and my knee almost gave way as I walked from the bus stop to the office this morning. People such as me were not born to a life of heavy lifting, so the two day extravaganza of circus strongman heroics I treated my children to were obviously not without consequence. The walk to school was uneventful as ever, so I have that to be thankful, along with my wife getting her new passport, some bolts to fix the TV to the wall and a new plug for the sink (listed in ascending order of importance). Still, no wonder that I wasn’t my usual productive self this morning after the weekend we’ve had. And there’s only three more days before it’s Chinese New Year and everything stops for four days. Oh my oh my.