24 hours of chaos.
It looked like someone took the world's largest can opener to the top of the truck. I hadn't seen the tree branch... the corner of the roof peeled back like a can of tuna.
This memory is what's flashing through my mind today while I'm at the U-Haul checkout counter. I'm gritting my teeth so I won't start laughing. They haven't given me the keys yet and I don't want to give them a reason not to. Today, I’m just moving some furniture a couple towns over. But that time I'd hit the tree? That was a 24 hour excursion across multiple state lines.
That may not have been the wildest day of my life, but it was certainly the longest.
I remember standing shoulder to shoulder with two friends (and coworkers) on the campus quad of a prestigious high school, staring at the tree-branch-sized hole in the top of our moving truck. I was so tired I wasn't even upset. It was more like "welp, of course that would happen right now. Alright... let's keep going I guess."
I chose to cut corners that day—and that's immediately what I'd thought of when looking back-and-forth between the tree branch and the rooftop puncture wound.
The whole thing had been a gamble. I was a sophomore in college at the time, and I was running a growing business that moved kids out of their dorms and stored their stuff locally—no need to shlep things back and forth between semesters. It first took off in New England college towns, but quickly spread to the boarding school circuit. The best college towns for business were ones that had multiple, like Amherst, MA. The best prep schools were ones clustered within the same state, like Connecticut.
See, the thing about my business model was that it was very, very time constrained: most schools moved in and out for the year around the same time. So, I started playing a twisted version of scheduling Tetris, coordinating multiple moves— across multiple crews—on the same day. That's what'd happened when I'd hit the tree. We'd had limited resources and five separate schools to move out. So I convinced two friends to become a crew with me for a day. The catch? I'd pay them a bonus plus whatever we'd have spent on hotels if we worked straight through the night. Which is how we ended up leaving at 4am and returning the following morning at sunrise... more than 24 hours later.
I'd been exhausted when backing that truck up toward the tree. It was our last dorm building on the last campus before we'd start our long trek home, three states away. But there was no way to get the truck close enough to the building doors to load it without driving on the grass.
"Fuck it."
It'd been my call, so it was only fitting that it backfired.
Even though we'd cut a few corners to make it happen, we did the damn thing and completed all five campus move-outs that day by working through the night without sleep. But we did also drive home with a giant hole in the roof. And we had to rotate drivers very, very often because we were all so sleep deprived. Once we got home, I opted to sleep it off before calling our CFO about the insurance claim...
At least I made one good decision.
Today, in the same city where that chaotic 24-hour-day began, I drove off the U-Haul lot calmly at 9am. Later, I met up with one of the same guys from that crew, and we both shook our heads and laughed about the time we tried to peel the roof off of a moving truck with a tree branch.
Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
62/365
When you think back on your missteps, are you able to slow down enough to admit what went wrong? Do you absorb the lessons you learned?
onward.
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