I often refer to the period of time after college graduation as my summer vacation that lasted 3 years. I wandered. I had odd jobs. Everyone should be so lucky.
I worked for a moving company here in Philadelphia intermittently from 1996-1997. The warehouse had a 40 ft rock climbing wall, a mini ramp, a trampoline, a fridge full of beer, and a large collection of Chris Farley and Adam Sandler movies on loop on the TV. And it paid $25 an hour.
My coworkers included a smorgasbord of local artists, musicians, skateboarders, and bikers. If you were looking to put off adulthood, you couldn’t really ask for a better hideout.
Anyway, there was one guy who wasn’t hiding. We’ll call him Vlad. He was a recent arrival from Russia. He co-owned the business with a Philly musician. From what I could gather about him, he was ex-soviet army. Something told me that the scars on his arm were a result of his time working for that particular corporation. Maybe he was in Afghanistan. He was old enough/ the timing seemed right.
Anyway, early on in my tenure, I was out with Vlad. We were having a rough day. We were on the second of 2 moves. The first went reasonably well. The second was a ball buster. We moved a guy out of one 3 story walk up to another 3 story walk up. It was hot. The crew was dragging and getting sloppy.
Vlad and I are switched with the other 2 on the crew to finish packing the truck. I go to move this dresser a little to the right, not paying attention to the table leaning precariously on it, not seeing the boxes tilting against it on the side closer to the cab.
Vlad stops me and says “Chris. No. You must always treat the furniture like wild ahnimahl. Because you never know what it weil do…”
And that was probably the most important thing I learned from Vlad.
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[...] said, looking at homes, staged to buy, is alot like working for a moving company. You see inside peoples lives, you get a sense of who they are, or in some cases were, based on [...]
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