A Long-Awaited Reunion With My Kitchen Utensils, or, Oh, Columbia! I can finally feel at home!

Here is how the moving company situation went down:

Thursday, July 10th, Miriam calls Anything Anywhere again, after being told last week that our things had left California on the 2nd, and that we'd get a call two days before the truck would arrive. When Miriam talked to the guy, he was *shocked* she hadn't received a call – they would be there the next day. Also, they would need the rest of the payment…in cash. The rest of the payment? Well, let's just say it's well over what even two people could each pull from an ATM (at least, I think). And, keep in mind, this was a figure that was worked down from a larger one they wanted to charge us – even though they were nearly a week late, in breach of their contract.
So, we had to scramble to get that cash. And this was at 3:30 PM EST. We did have the money – in two places, actually. One is our San Diego credit union account, which poses the ATM problem. Our other account is with Wachovia (which we opened here in Columbia). However, with new accounts, they freeze funds for seven days after deposit for the first six months. Of course, it hadn't been seven days since our last deposit. Of course.
What we worked was this: Miriam's parents would bring cash to a Wachovia (that just opened in San Diego) to deposit in our account. It would thus be immediate (the hold is just on checks), and we could pull it out from our Wachovia branch in the morning. The branch manager in San Diego even went as far as to e-mail the Columbia branch manager and teller manager, as well as the local regional manager, about the situation. So, Wachovia not so bad in our book…except the whole holding our checks up for six months.
We were only given an approximate time when they would be arriving – sometime after 10 am. Miriam decided to go ahead and go to class, and I called into my the job I had just gotten (though I had explained to them that this might come up…and I was really on the schedule yet). Our friend Michelle (her husband, Collin, is in Miriam's class at USC) came over, with her 4-month old daughter, Delilah, to act as a witness of this cash exchange. As the whole thing seemed kind of shady, we made up a de facto receipt (on lined paper) for the driver and me to sign. Though there would end up being a bill of lading to sign, that didn't mean things didn't get shadier.
Around 11, I get a call from the driver's Russian fiancée. They were on Broad River, but couldn't find the entrance to our complex. I told her more details of where it was. 20 minutes later, she calls again to explain that they've found the entrance, but have a long trailer and are waiting to make the left onto Farrington Way. It was probably another 20 minutes when I went out to the side of our building to look down the street and see where they were. Though, you can't see the main road from there. I stood for a while, but it was too hot to stand there for too long. And then, right as I walk back into the apartment, the phone rings again. They've made the left, but now are confused about which building is ours. So I go out to the street again to wave at them. And, holy crap, that is a huge trailer!
So, they pull up and park along the main street of the complex (Farrington Way). The driver, Mike Webb (totally doesn't like a private investigator from a noir film, doesn't it?), introduces himself and comes into the place to skope things out. First off, we (Michelle and I) need to move our cars. He'd also like to move the Volvo from next door, but we find out that they person with the keys is not at home at the moment. Then there was the matter of the payment. Like I said, pulling the money went fine. Everything having to do with the money after that...not so much.
He wanted to make sure that all the bills were not counterfeit. He had a whole speech (that he re-iterated several time) about "nothing against me" and "don't want to go for jail for no one." So he starts going through them, and that's when he spots some that don't have tags in them (the strips that run along the short length of the bill; bar codes, as he called them). Well, they're just old bills, but he goes on about having never seen hundies (my word, not his) without "bar codes" and starts worrying they're fakes, even if they came from Wachovia. So what he wants to do is have me drive him to the Wachovia branch and check with them on these mysterious non-tagged bills. So...what can I do? They guy's got all our stuff, that we've been waiting two weeks for, and which we scrambled to get this cash for. This would be the extra-shadiness I spoke of earlier.
We hop in my car and I drive him down to the Wachovia, which isn't too far, but still a little bit too far for complete comfort. He talks about his fiancée's Russian family -- about how you must be there for birthdays. Simply a call or a card won't do.
Now, this is a Friday, at noon, so you can imagine what the Wachovia was like. Packed. So there's a huge line for the tellers. But that's not gonna cut it for Mike Webb. He heads over to a help desk in the set-up-a-new-account area. After looking around in the offices for anyone, he comes around the other side of the desk, surreptitiously, which he later said was because he was hold a assload (my word) of cash. He asked the lady at the desk about it. I give her a it's-him-not-me look, and she takes the money over behind the teller counter. He follows, in a move that to me, makes it look like he's cutting in line. I sort of stay back, trying to be a observer rather than a participant in this whole situation. And they told him what I suspected: the bills were printed before the tagging system was implemented (1990). They're just old bills.
We returned to the apartment, the cash's validity verified. Now it was time to unload. That all went pretty smoothly. We had a table whose top came off. Mike blamed that on shotty manufacturing, which is probably true, and fixed it anyway with some special glue mixture. The only thing that didn't pan out well was the reconstruction of our bed. Apparently, Mike's helpers couldn't make much of the parts and only put it together to a point. They left a beam out, didn't screw in the slats, and then seemingly hid the rest of the parts, so that when I went to fix the bed later, I went out and bought all new parts (screws & such). I found the original parts a week or so afterwards. So we have extra now.
Miriam came by for a bit, between classes, and I sent Michelle home when Miriam left (she'd already been there long enough, especially with the baby). It took Mike and the guys a couple hours to get everything in. But once they did, and we went over the bill of lading, and they left...our reunion with our stuff was nearly complete.
Now we just had to get it out of the boxes.
That, a month later, is still a work in progress. The downstairs is box-free, and everything is where it should be. The bedroom (upstairs), too, is box-free. It's down to the office/2nd bedroom...again, as in the last apartment. I will have to do something with that stuff, as my parents will be staying in that room for a couple days in the beginning of October. It's just that the rest of the stuff is photo albums, files, loose stationary and miscellaneous crap we've acquired through the years -- just stuff I don't feel an immediate need to unpack. So it'll probably wait to a week before my parents come.