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Neko relaxing in the front seat at a gas stop...
Our back seat, taken over by Neko's riding space
Day 2 has concluded, and fortunately with much less drama than the first time. Although I am still not a fan of moving.
We set out from Bloomington, IL around 2PM and arrived in Charleston, WV around 10PM, without much craziness. The cat has been surprisingly calm, even when his diazepam should theoretically no longer have an effect. That’s notable because every time we’ve taken him to the vet has been a nightmare. Perhaps he is adjusting to us moving him randomly.
We did get one unfortunate piece of news today – apparently the grass is so high at our house that the city put a notice on the front door. Our real estate agent, Ronnie Hooks, called us, herself having been called by one of our neighbors, to tell us this fantastic news. So that we didn’t arrive immediately needing to mow the lawn, she was also kind enough to set up someone to mow the lawn before we get there, which is especially nice considering she’s already been paid and has no financial reason to help us anymore. I suppose she’s just that awesome.
We do arrive in VA Beach tomorrow, although we won’t be staying in the house. The electricity won’t be turned on until Wednesday morning, so we thought sleeping on an air mattress without air conditioning in the dark our first night wasn’t as pleasant a way to break the house in as we’d like. We will be visiting the house, though – my wife keeps wondering what terrible things have gone wrong with it in the three months since we saw it last. I don’t think it will be much different, but she doesn’t seem to believe me. Fingers crossed…
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About two weeks ago, we bought several bulk bundles of boxes, a few hundred feet of bubble wrap, and assorted packing materials from our local Minneapolis U-Line distributor. We spent those two weeks packing. This was a substantial step up from the last time we moved – that packing process started about two days before we were supposed to move and ended about two days afterward.
This time, we thought, we’ll be proactive. We’re moving across the country (hiring professional movers and everything!), so we should do things right. Virtually everything small we owned was in a box of some sort. Anything larger (like our bookcases, although they were disassembled), we left out. Apparently, that was an incorrect course of action. When the movers arrived, they came in, looked at our pile of stuff, and sighed.
I didn’t take that to be a good sign, and it wasn’t. Evidently – and I wish someone, such as, for example, the moving company, had told us this – movers can only take objects wrapped in blankets and packing tape or packed in a corrugated cardboard box. So the movers set to wrapping every single object we owned in blankets and miles of packing tape. At one point, I even drove to the Container Store to buy extra boxes into which we could put the smaller non-cardboard boxes. The movers arrived around 6PM (they described this as “in the afternoon”) and left at 5:30AM. Oh yes – they spent nearly 12 hours packing our one-bedroom apartment into their truck. Admittedly, we have quite a bit of stuff. But 12 hours? We moved nearly the same amount ourselves in a U-Haul to this apartment two years ago in less than 5 hours.
And it cost us too. The $1800 estimate we were given was of course based on too little information – an extra $800 in space from the estimate was needed, plus $600 in extra packing materials (including nearly $100 in packing tape!). We ended up with around a $3000 bill for moving, which I think is a little steep.
The scheduling also put a dent in our plans. Originally, we assumed the movers would be arriving around 2PM Saturday and spend maybe 6-7 hours loading. After they left, we were planning to clean the apartment, set up the inflatable bed for our last night, and have a nice relaxing transition to our 24 hours worth of driving. We had even made an appointment for Comcast to come between 8 and 10AM to pick up their equipment, and we told our landlady that we’d be out by 10.
At 6AM, I went to sleep for a nice 5-hour nap while my wife started cleaning (as one of us needed to be rested in order to drive the 8 hours later that day). At 11AM, I woke to find my wife still cleaning, although she’d called our landlady to delay our move-out until 1PM and had napped next to me for an hour (although I didn’t notice it happen). Comcast still hadn’t arrived. I ran the excess 60 lbs. of clothes that we weren’t taking with us to Goodwill and got back to help with the final cleaning and loading the car. Our landlady knocks at the door at 1:15PM with her carpet cleaner and basically shoved us out the door. She promised she’d deliver the Comcast box to the company. And I don’t think we’ll be getting our security deposit back.
So finally, we are able to pack the car in earnest. That would be fine except that we never had time to test-load the car and have way too much stuff. Add that to the fact that we decided to buy a N2N 36″ soft-sided pet crate for our cat to live in during the trip. Now, this crate is pretty awesome, but it is huge. It takes up about 75% of the back seat, and I can’t see out the back window. On the bright side, the cat’s litter box, food, bed, and a cardboard piece for scratching all fit in it simultaneously. The cat has even taken to standing on top of the litter box inside the crate. Which is really amusing when we take a corner a little too fast.
As I think I mentioned before, our stuff is being held by the movers for about a month while we install new flooring, new paint, and new drywall in our new house in Virginia Beach. So we needed to pack enough items to live for a month in our little Saturn sedan, which came down to an inflatable queen bed, clothes, tools, assorted pots and pans, and the cat. It’s stuffed. When I open the trunk, various bags literally pop out.
But it does fit. We stuff everything in, fed the cat some diazepam, and set off. That’s when the meowing started. Apparently, preventing the cat from feeling anxiety enables him to express anger instead. Fortunately, we found the secret to stopping the meowing – my wife let the cat out of his gigantic crate and simply let him sleep in her lap. Problem solved.
As I told my wife earlier today, I consider this first day of the move not my first act as a new professor but my final act as a graduate student (even though my defense was several weeks ago, the school officially graduates people at the end of the month – in this case, 5/31). This of course means that if it had gone smoothly and as expected, it just wouldn’t have felt right.
So now, 30 hours into this adventure, we are in Bloomington, IL at an Extended Stay America. And surprisingly enough, in terms of the overall trip, we are on time. I can only hope that tomorrow will be a little smoother…
This recent article in Wired discusses the work of Dr. Byron Reeves, who turned e-mail in an organization into a game. Each week, employees at the organizations he works with receive tokens which they can then attach to their e-mails, which they can then spend to make their e-mails more important.
So for example, an organization provides 100 tokens each week per employee using Reeves’ system, called “Attent.” The employees are then able to attach however many tokens they want to any particular e-mail in an effort to make sure people read and prioritize the information they are providing. It works surprisingly well.
If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent’s Outlook inbox. Reeves figured this would encourage people to send less e-mail: Those who are parsimonious would wind up with lots of tokens, which means when they really have something to say, they can load it up with tokens and make sure it’ll get through. Sure enough, that’s what happened. When a work group at IBM tried out Attent, messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal.
Thus, it appears that games, or at least the mechanics of games, can be a valuable way to change employee behavior for relatively little cost. Attent itself isn’t even that psychologically complex a system – it simply encourages a little reflection on how important any particular e-mail really is.
But there may be a downside: when you introduce a game, you may unwittingly encourage unhealthy competition. Consider foursquare, an online social networking game where people living in NYC check in with every location that they visit in the city, such as bars, coffee shops, and restaurants. Each check-in, you increase your chances that you will be dubbed “Mayor” of that location – in other words, you’ve visited it more than anyone else. In theory, this should encourage people to get out and meet others that like similar locations. In practice, it creates a sense of competition so that people play the game for the game’s sake (to stay Mayor and “win”), rather than its intended purpose. The designers are trying to adjust the rewards system to address this, but it’s unclear how successful they will be.
Such hijacking of game intentions is what I worry would happen in a real organization without proper thought given to game design. Imagine a game system tied to mentoring – each mentor gets points for every person that gives them a positive review as a mentor at the end of each quarter. Points are then tied to other rewards (whatever those might be – an extra day off, a cash bonus, a free lunch with the boss, etc.). It’s easy to imagine that each mentor wanting to win might try to increase their chances with whatever means possible; they might get all of the people in their unit to rate them even though no actual mentoring has occurred with promises of shared prizes.
And in case you were wondering, I have my own plan about a game-related system to be attached to web-based training. But that’s a post for another day!