Thursday 5th March 2009, 23:17
A downright frustrating upright
I'll post an update on the nice/nasty celebs list in the next blog, but for now, some advice for if you ever need to hire a piano moving company...
I needed to move a piano. Hence me calling a piano movers. Not being an everyday task, I didn't quite know where to begin, or how much the going rate is (it's about £100, it seems, maybe a bit under). But I found a nice website detailing lots of local piano movers, so I fired out some emails asking for quotes and if they were available soon. Left it for a day, as not too many "man with a van"s - (or is it "men with vans"? But that doesn't keep the same rhyming fun that "man with a van" has. Anyway...) - not too many with "men with ven" are sat around on the internet all day. They're off moving things.
A day later, a phone call. Huzzah. Yes, he can move it on Tuesday. Ace. Tuesday comes and the phone rings again. Now he's saying he can do it on Wednesday. Fair dos. Later on Tuesday afternoon, phone rings again. Now he's saying Tuesday again. I sigh. Make your mind up, I think to myself. Then he calls again. More like Thursday now. Alright, I say, angrily, Thursday it is. See you then. Ten minutes later, a big van arrives. But it's Tuesday, I think, and he just said Thursoh hang on.
Do you see what's happened? I've been an idiot, that's what's happened. And all those piano movers I got in touch with asking for quotes, they've all got back in touch and I inadvertently have booked them all. Well they all sounded the same - like burly geezer men. You don't get many wee Scottish women moving pianos. It's 'man with a van' not 'gran with a transit'. So an easy mistake to make. Only handy thing is that they all couldn't do the same day, otherwise I'd get the embarrassment of having three big vans arriving at once - and more importantly three big men - and having to explain that two weren't needed, cos (s) I'm an idiot and (b) I've only got one piano.
So a few awkward phone calls later, I'd cancelled the others and stuck with the fella who had turned up, who reluctantly accepted the fee that I insisted he'd quoted, while actually of course it was someone else entirely.
He and his mate loaded up the piano onto his van - quite impressive the rollers and pulleys they've got to do it, and mine was an easy job. They were telling me about the grand pianos they've had to airlift in to some buildings. Some buildings I guess it's easier to put the piano in first, then build the building around it.
Once the piano was out of my front door, I left them to their loading and raced on ahead to get to the house it was being taken to, so I could clear the way for them to put it in its new home. They said they'd be another ten minutes fastening the piano's seatbelt, so I figured that would give me plenty of time to get from A to B. But not reckoning on rush hour, I was amazed to see only five minutes later the same van overtake me. How rude. There was no point them getting there before me, AND they said they'd be ages yet, so suddenly I had to cut up, overtake, and do what I could to overtake this van. This was helped by me being in a van too (my car being serviced, so my dad had lent me his work van). There was a good few minutes of White Van vs White Van on the Guildford one-way system then, as at every traffic light I raced to jump in front of the movers in the next-door lane, and they, not knowing it was me in the van, and ever-keen to cut up another white van, tried to do likewise.
I won, incidentally. But I didn't like the look on his face when he got to the other end and realised the driver of the rival van was me. Still, it was probably better than the look on the faces of every other piano mover I'd contacted, all sat at home cursing that they'd said Thursday and not Tuesday, and lost out on a job, or at least a third of a job.