Boston Dispatch #9 - Cash Money and Thick Accents

So much for painting today. I just couldn't muster the will to do another room so I decided to go easy on myself. I had a few holes here and there that I patched and painted over to finish up the kitchen, living room, study and bedroom. As you can probably guess, that took all of an hour to do so I spent the rest of the day wandering and leaving successively meaner messages in Pat's vmail. Bastard doesn't like to return phone calls because he's 'studying'. What a monkey.

I wandered up to Harvard today and all around the back streets off of Mass Ave. There are almost no houses to be found around here. All you see are older apartment buildings like ours or massive old houses that have been split up into condos. The occasional semi-high-rise is thrown in for added populations density. If you consider all that living space coupled with 95% of the roads being barely two lanes, you'll see why mass transit is a major part of life here. It's not just some wasteful mockery of public transit funds (ie- MARTA in Atlanta), it's the real deal. It has to be.

Speaking of transportation, I've gotten a couple of calls in the last two days about my car. It's sitting on a lot down in Atlanta right now trying to get itself sold. The asking price for the Naughty Vic is 3200, which is the high blue book value in Atlanta. Considering how much I paid for it and how much work I've done on it in the last two years, it's probably worth it. But I think we'd go as low as 2800 in a pinch. Anyway, the two people that have called me were guys with very thick accents. The first guy sounded like he spoke Spanish natively; the guy today had a very gravelly slavic accent. Being difficult to understand wasn't the only thing they had in common. Neither were interested in knowing anything about the car or the maintenance that's been done on it. More importantly, both of them offered me '2000 dollars, cash money' for the blasted thing, as though the fact that they were offering legal tender should be enough to entice me into dropping the price by more than 1/3rd the asking price. Hell, I've got the title...it's not like I'm trying to fence the damn thing.

So, I told them both that the lowest I'd go was 3k and they both got off the phone rather quickly after that. Seriously, who would accept such an offer? These guys were both swindling bastards, I'm sure of it. I'm positive they were looking for a rock bottom price so that they could flip it and make some coin. They didn't even ask anything about the car...bastards.

Finally, tomorrow the movers are coming and I'm not very happy about the circumstances. I told the driver of the 18-wheeler that there was no way in Hell that he'd be able to maneuver our street, let alone park when he picked up our stuff in Atlanta. So, dude calls me tonight around 6, after the 'office' has closed, to tell me that no shuttle (ie- smaller moving van) has been scheduled and he's just going to try to come by between 7 and 8 am tomorrow. I'm not sure what part of 'not physically possible' he doesn't understand but lemme explain how tomorrow is going to play out. I know this because it's exactly how it worked out when he picked up our stuff in Atlanta. First, he'll show up, park his g-damned Semi out in front and effectively block traffic on our street until he's threatened by the police. Since we're two blocks from city hall, this will take less than fifteen minutes. Then, he'll call in to the 'dispatch' where they'll inform him that he can get a shuttle, but not until Noon. He'll go park somewhere and a shuttle will finally arrive with our stuff some time around 2 and they'll take 4 hours to unload it. Brilliant! I've already left messages for the dispatch and the corporate moving person that's been our contact all this time. I can only hope that someone gets in early, checks the messages and gets it sorted out before dude tries to drive his golfball semi through Cambridge's gardenhose streets.

Cheers,
S.