The Move That Took Four Hours Longer Than I Quoted

I quoted a three bedroom split level at five hours, two guys, one truck, standard stuff, the kind of job I can basically eyeball from the intake photos at this point. By eleven that morning I had a call from the crew lead telling me they were barely past the garage. Turned out the homeowner hadn’t mentioned the finished basement, which on the walkthrough form just says “storage,” and storage in this business can mean six boxes or it can mean a full second household nobody bothered to pack.

I should have known better, honestly. Basements are the one category on our intake sheet I don’t trust anymore, people undersell them every single time, either because they’ve forgotten what’s actually down there or because they don’t want the estimate to go up. By the time the crew got through it we were running four hours over, into overtime, into a second trip the next morning for the stuff that didn’t fit on the truck. I spent the rest of that day on the phone rebooking two other jobs around the delay, apologizing to a customer who had every right to be annoyed, and mentally rewriting our intake form for the hundredth time.

Here’s the part that’s a little embarrassing to admit. That night I got home, pulled Kemet off the shelf to teach a new player, and caught myself doing the exact same thing to a board game that I’d just spent all day getting burned by professionally, eyeballing the box, assuming I knew how long setup would take because I’d done it before. It took fifteen minutes longer than I told her it would. Nothing dramatic, just tiles that needed sorting by faction because the insert isn’t built for that, same story as always. But I noticed the pattern immediately, because I’d lived it twice in twelve hours.

I don’t think this is really about moving trucks or board game boxes specifically. It’s that I’ve built a whole professional instinct around estimating how long a physical task takes, and it turns out that instinct doesn’t clock out with me. I look at any new game now and unconsciously run the same math I ran on that basement, what’s actually in here, not what the label says. Most of the time it saves me from being surprised. Every so often, like that morning, I still get it wrong anyway, and there’s something almost comforting about that. Even the person whose whole job is estimating gets surprised by what’s actually in the box.

I did eventually redesign that basement question on our intake form. It now asks for a rough box count instead of a category. It’s not perfect. Neither is my guess at how long Kemet takes to set up the first time somebody new sits down. I’ve made my peace with both.