When helping people isn’t appreciated…

Earlier this week, Groovy came to me with an email that she received at work concerning this family that was needing to move out of their present home and into another one because the wife in the family had just had a heart transplant and, due to the dust/mold in the house, it was aggravating some condition. The gist of it was saying, “We could use some help.” I thought about it for about 1/10th of a second and said, “Ok…we’ll help.”

I fully intended for us to be the only ones there and, on top of that, I just knew that nothing would be packed up and ready to load on a truck. My worst fear was this 2 hour job taking several times that.

We got to Arlington just before 11am and I was pleased to see several other people waiting around (I won’t name them all, but there were a total of 4 people there when we arrived). The owners of the house were not there, so we waited outside for a bit.

When the owner arrived, we spent about 10 minutes going through the house. The house was, as I feared, not packed. Well, parts of it weren’t packed. Our first task was to try and fill some boxes with stuff and to disassemble the beds (4 of them). I assigned myself the bed task and began breaking down bed frames. Once completed, I started helping everyone bring things out of the basement (one of 3 floors in this house) which included around 400 lbs of weights, a weight machine, about 40 boxes and various other small things.

The main floor of the house was full of furniture and it didn’t make sense to deposit all the stuff from the basement there, so it all went out to the 27’ truck that was waiting for everything. Once all the boxes were loaded (this took until after lunch which was at 1), we began loading all the furniture and other things. This took quite a bit longer (till about 3).

During this time, I was kinda frustrated as the owner of the house really wasn’t doing that much work. I mean, here we were, trying to help this guy who was in “need”, and he, along with his 4 kids (8-18) just kept walking around and didn’t do much of anything. Add to that the fact that they knew they would be moving for a month, and my frustration level was quickly rising.

Finally, we left to go to their new house. We took a different route than the truck did and arrived about 5 minutes ahead of them. We pulled up in front of this 3 story…MANSION. This house was literally worth around $1 Million (something that was commented on by several of us volunteers) and was just about the nicest house I’ve ever been in (even though you wouldn’t catch me buying anything that…gaudy). My frustration level shot through the roof. The “good deed” that I thought I was doing turned form that into an all-out “advantage-taking-fest”.

We unloaded my truck and started on another vehicle before the big truck arrived. We started unloading all the big furniture and putting it roughly where it would end up. There was this lady upstairs who kept trying to tell everyone where everything went. The last I checked, she wasn’t a member of the family and she didn’t help break things down at the other house…so I didn’t understand why she was bossing everyone about. I was surprised to see the owner actually help move stuff in…then again, I think he was actually more worried about us scratching up the paint or his furniture than anything else (at one point when he and I were carrying a dresser up a flight of stairs, it was balanced on top of my head and he was just guiding it so it wouldn’t hit the wall…I promise this is true).

It took us until right at 5pm to get everything unloaded into the house. I’ll be honest, there were a bunch of boxes that had room names on them, but I put them all in the garage because, quite frankly, I was tired of being given vague instructions and it just made more sense to put everything in one place to begin with.

To end the story, we came home and I took a nice hot shower. We started out quite frustrated (even groovy was tired and frustrated with the owners, the lack of real “help” that was needed, etc) but by the time we got home, I think we had gotten past the big parts. Right now, I’m sore and tired, but ready for “real” work.

Two final thoughts: It’s sad when your willingness to help other people is taken advantage of, and, for something to actually be called “help”…the person requesting the help needs to actually do something.