This American Life - 162: Moving

Broadcast on: 23 Jun 2000

And has been a construction worker, a public high school teacher, a bike messenger, a laborer. But he says the best job he ever had was as a mover. This was in New York. Part of it, he says, was that the actual work was so straightforward. Part of it was that every day he was entering all these other people's lives, and he never knew where he'd end up. It was so personal somehow, especially when the people hired movers to pack everything for them. I mean, you were coming in at a special kind of time for people where they were pretty tense. You got to see a lot very fast, you know, nine o'clock in the morning you're bringing all these pads and boxes and straps and everything into somebody's house as quickly as possible and taking like a very quick look around their life. You get a very good idea very quickly of who they are. It's like being a spy. It felt a lot like being a spy. Yeah. When you're moving people out all the time, is the thing that occurs to you, how similar people's lives are or how different most of our lives are? Well, most things that people moved are pretty much the same. Everybody has a bed and some, or at least in this part of the country, everybody has a bed and, you know, some books and a lot of kitchenware and generally a couch and a few other things. Everyone tends to have a stereo number and tends to have a television. And then somebody will stand out for one reason or like they'll have a lot of music, like a lot of CDs or they'll have a collection of wines or something that will have to be real careful with, but they don't, there's not that much of a difference. It's like whatever it reminds me of it is, you know, when you're reading in, you know, people or Us Magazine or any magazine, like any setting where you see inside the living rooms of the super rich and super famous and usually when I see that I just think like that's it. Right. Like that's what they've got. There's a coffee table and a couple of chairs and a couch and a lamp like that's the best you can do. That's it? But yeah, you just, you'd be moving a couch and it didn't matter. It was sometimes, again, very rich people, there's only so many configurations for things like couches. One of the moments that was always kind of interesting, he says, was when people's stuff was all loaded into the truck. Everything they'd accumulated in this world stuffed into this tiny space. It's a humbling thing for a person. It's a humbling thing and they would get, they would get very upset often and they'd be very unsettled by that. And I could sort of understand that because like everything you, in a sense, everything that you'd worked for and sort of decided to find you was now sitting in this truck. And generally like if they were around, they'd look at us and we generally, you know, the foreman would say, "All right, we're going to go get lunch now," because usually it'd

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