"HOMES" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

while they are at work, so as to avoid painful tragedies. ("WHAT HAVE YOU
DONE WITH JENNIFER?")

Another problem that sometimes arises with professional movers is getting
them to give you your furniture back once they put it in the van. This
problem is especially serious if the driver, after he puts your stuff in his
van, goes around and picks up several other households full of stuff, which he
then has to drop off, usually in Zaire, before he can go to your new home.
The solution to this problem is to do what savvy moving families have been
doing for years: hijack the truck. Get a gun, and simply demand that the
driver unload at your house first. Of course this means you'll wind up with
somebody else's possessions, but it doesn't really matter. You'll never get
them unpacked anyway.

MOVING YOURSELF

The big advantage of moving yourself is that you get to rent a rental
truck. Rental trucks are highly specialized vehicles that are not released
for use by the general public until they have undergone an intensive
"breaking-in" program of being used to carry violent cattle with severe
intestinal disorders over rough terrain for a minimum of 1,700,000 miles
without maintenance.

These machines are capable of traveling the length of several football
fields on a single tankful of gas, yet they boast the kind of cornering,
braking, and acceleration characteristics normally associated with municipal
stadiums. No question about it: Once you get behind the wheel of a rental
truck, you'll wonder what the sticky substance on the seat is. But before
you're ready to think about the truck, you need to go through all your
possessions and make a serious futile effort to get rid of them. A key
element in this effort is ...

THE GARAGE SALE

A garage sale is basically when strangers come to your house and examine
your personal belongings with un disguised contempt.

The first ones you'll meet will be the garage sale Regulars. Garage
sales are their lives. They'll show up at your home early, generally about
two days before the sale is scheduled to begin. The way they find out about
it is, they use computers to examine satellite reconnaissance photographs of
suburban neighborhoods for signs of incipient garage sale activity, such as
people standing around arguing about how much to charge for a 1953 set of the
Encyclopedia Britannica that's missing volume 18 (Saliva-Tapeworm).

How do you price all those treasured personal belongings? The truth is,
it doesn't matter what you charge, because the Regulars aren't going to pay
it. These are people who do not own a single possession, including furniture,
that they paid more than $2.50 for, and they are not about to change their
policy for the likes of you.