You Will Not Believe These Crazy PCS Stories — The Home Edition
Or Maybe You Will Because You’ve Lived It!
PCS Season. It’s filled with frenetic movement, lots of stress and unbelievable tales from military spouses. During Week 3of the PCS Lost + Found Giveaway, we asked military spouses to share their wildest kids/pets stories. The stories flowed, jaws dropped and we all had a good laugh about some of the insanity that takes place during a PCS.
Below are just some of the crazy anecdotes our participants shared during the giveaway!
“Here’s a video of the movers dropping an 800 pound gun safe off the back of the truck onto some piled up moving blankets. Safety first!” — Kate S.
“Literally broke our bed headboard and dinning room table into pieces! My box of glassware was a box of glass. 😓 And they told me they didn’t have our washer and dryer…..we didn’t have a washer or dryer at the time🤦🏻 …so no, they sure didn’t have our washer or dryer.” — Jen S.
“Well ma’am, if we find ’em, do you want ‘em?”
“On this last move, they lost an entire crate that contained all our mattresses, sofas, outside patio furniture, a lot of my daughters boxes that contained her stuff she had been gathering for her first year of college and my brand new Nespresso machine. Our washer and dryer also got banged up and our washer now has an awful shake.” — BE R.
“Moving from Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling to Connecticut: The movers showed up with three separate trucks instead of one large truck. The delivery date came and went, and we never received our household items. When we called the movers, we discovered one truck was located in Southern Virginia (which is in the opposite direction of where we moved to), another truck was located at a holding facility in Philly, and the third truck was parked in Connecticut, but the drivers left it at a storage facility. Once all three trucks arrived, our son’s bunkbed mattress was soaked through with water, nightstand legs were broken, our 55” TV screen scratched, washer lid broken, and, to top it all off, the movers scratched our brand new hardwood floors when moving the dryer.” — Daniel S.
You know when more than one truck shows up it’s going to be a tense move….
“My HHG was supposed to be put on a truck and driven from Maryland to Nebraska. A simple four-day trip and scheduled to be delivered the week after they packed it all up. I have four special needs children, and the moving company has held our HHG (including my children’s medical equipment) hostage for over three weeks now.” — Shelly K.
“We moved back stateside and had our items delivered from storage. When the driver gets out, he immediately starts apologizing saying it looked like ‘this’ when he picked it up. Then they started pulling pieces of furniture off the truck. Literally pieces of furniture. We had to group the pieces by color in order to figure out what they once were. We lost a lot of items in that move.” — Melissa T.
Sounds like a hellish version of adult LEGOS
“On our last PCS, after we got everything unpacked and everything set up, lightning struck our townhouse and blew out our television, computer (which still hasn’t recovered), Internet router and our brand new Xbox 360 all in a matter of seconds 😳😂🇺🇸 #funnynow #butnotatthetime🤦🏽” — Amber P.
Surprise! Welcome Home!
“My husband had a desk from Fred Meyer that the movers apparently had a difficult time disassembling. So instead, they literally broke it into pieces. It was made of particle board (maybe one step up from an Ikea desk) and was totally unsalvageable by the time it made it to our new home. They ripped it up like a piece of paper! At least that meant he got a nice new desk for free!” — Ciara A.
“For our first PCS, not only were my things supposedly on the move for weeks (it only takes two days to get to where we live now) but when I finally got them almost all of the boxes were smooshed. Also I had a small bookcase that the movers decided to wrap only in paper, so when it arrived it was completely broken and went straight to garbage. At the end of the day the move gave me a great reason for buying new things. Whoever said that retail therapy doesn’t help don’t know what they’re talking about.” — Mariya R.
This lady knows what she’s talking about!
“During our first PCS as a family, we owned the house we were moving out of and apparently the packers ‘didn’t feel like walking the boxes upstairs from the basement.’ Their solution? Literally kicking out the basement window so they could toss the packed boxes into the window well and have another packer grab them and toss them up and out of the well to the lawn above. We had to take the extra time to file the claim for repairs and ensure the repairs were completed before we left on our OCONUS flight.
Because we all have that kind of time after packout.
To make matters even more colorful, we (shockingly) had over $10,000 worth of claims in that move.” — Katie Beth P.
“When your stuff goes into storage it never ends well! Once they brought us three box springs and one mattress instead of our two mattresses and two box springs. It took them a few days of combing through the warehouse to find our mattress — thank goodness it didn’t get delivered to someone else!” — Erin W.
It’s like a bad game of ‘Memory’
“Efficient German movers pack everything…..even garbage. Needless to say, we had a very smelly crate when we unpacked in Georgia, in August. Gross!” — Bethany L.
“Our unpackers tried to put the crib railing on upside down in an effort to not put the crib together 😩” — Amy S.
“Our driver was older so as we were marking off the boxes, we noticed half way through the numbers they were yelling to us were already checked… We questioned the driver and he said he couldn’t read the numbers very well. Needless to say I am missing the kitchen box with all my glasses, casserole dishes, and who knows what else be said we don’t know what boxes are actually missing :-)” — Tara H.
“Did you say 60 or 50?”
“I said 21!”
“They broke our dryer, but we didn’t know about the codes. So, when they came back and said they didn’t have to pay for it because the status of the item was unknown a the time of packing (because we unplugged everything like they said to), we were shocked. Then, we were doubly shocked when they asked us if we had kept the dryer. (Um, we purchased a new dryer. Where in base housing would one store an extra dryer until the issue was resolved?) Lessons learned.” — Jamie B.
“During our last PCS, the packers showed up about three hours late on a Friday. A couple hours later they told us they were done. We thought, ‘Wow that is the fastest we’ve ever been packed!’ They all left and we stepped into the garage. Not. One. Single. Thing. was packed. So the drivers show up Monday and we told them they still have the entire garage to pack. Needless to say, they were not happy with their co-workers! It took them EIGHT hours to pack the garage. As they were loading the truck, they left the garage and front door propped open and, no joke, hundreds of flies got in the house. We spent the evening killing flies 😂” — Kristin O.
And so goes the first of the Ten Plagues of PCS’ing.
“Our packers packed a gallon of Coconut Oil. It melted through and we didn’t know until we arrived to very hot Florida. It ended up being swarmed with fire ants an ruined two other boxes. That was fun to go through while we wrote it off in our damaged goods.” — Anna K.
And so goes the second of the Ten Plagues of PCS’ing.
“When we moved to Georgia I looked out at my lawn to see the most beautiful, brand new, fresh-out-of-the-box baby furniture sitting on the lawn. The swing, an amazing rich brown and light bright green in papasan style, matched beautifully with the highchair and the exersaucer! The movers had it all set up and together in a cute little vignette on the front lawn.
I walked outside to admire just how cute, new and perfect it was. The movers then asked me where I would like the items to go. I looked at them with a quizzical look on my face, one eyebrow raised and my mouth in a smirk.😳
“Where should it go?”
“Where should it go?”
“Sir, IT’S NOT MINE!”
My youngest was 6-years-old and my husband and I made sure he was the last one! So no, sir, it does not belong to us. It took me almost 20 minutes to explain I was not keeping the items and they had to find who they belonged to. How all these items ended up in our creates and on the truck that “no other load was on” is something we have never been able to figure out. I feel horrible for who ever missing the items, as they were beautiful.” — Jenny H.
Ma’am, we operate under a “Finders, Keepers” policy. So where should it go?
“Our PCS move to Polk, we had an entire box taken, or went “missing”, it had all of our souvenirs that my husband brought back from Kuwait and Iraq; i was so sad!” — Claudia G.
“One of my favorites is the move where all of my Tupperware was individually wrapped in TONS of packing paper and all of my professionally framed pictures were piled into a box with not even one piece of paper between them.” — Kendel G.
“Our first PCS, we kept all our valuables with us as we drove across the country since I didn’t trust the movers with my most precious belongings (including obvious items like personal documents and jewelry, but also sentimental items like my baby book, wedding album and key chain collection). The joke was on me when as we arrived at Fort Lewis. We went to the Melting Pot to celebrate our successful road trip and while inside our car was broken into and EVERYTHING was stolen. I was devastated, not to mention frustrated as I made endless phone calls to replace all our documents and prevent identity fraud 😬 What a mess!” — Jessica R.
Talk about ironic
“We were leaving Maryland and going to Germany. When the packers arrived they had a little truck. At first, I thought it was a truck with more packing materials in case they missed something. As they got started I realized they intended on putting our HHG in it!
So I watched and waited to see what they were going to do and started to get nervous. I asked if they were packing certain things today and maybe different things tomorrow and he replied, “Oh no. This truck is for your stuff.” I tried to tell him it wasn’t big enough but he said basically that they have been doing this for a long time so they know what they are doing and visibly shrugged me off.
Long story short…they had to call two more trucks and more crew. They could have been done relatively quickly that day if he had listened but he insisted I had no clue what I was talking about. They left around 10PM after having to wait for more trucks to be delivered to the house. Needless to say, stuff was broken and missing when we unpacked at the next station. Why don’t they listen? It was our 6th move! I was trying to be helpful, LOL!” — Janet B.
MILLIE is an online community and digital marketplace that connects members of the military and their families with specialized knowledge and trusted resource providers to remove the stress and anxiety of PCSing. Check out MILLIE’s Installation and Neighborhood Guides, our network of Veteran and military spouse Realtors, and Scout, our on-demand task service composed of military spouses. Find out more at www.gomillie.com.
