• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 568 0

within the Charleston area but also services out-of-town moves throughout the entire Southeast, has a revolutionary way of charging for their moves, a system that has been copied by other moving companies over the years. Two men are sent out on the smaller jobs at a rate of $89 per hour plus a one-time $89 travel charge. For the bigger moves, a third man is sent out for an additional $21 per hour. This saves the company the hassle of having to go out on estimates, and it gives the customer a pretty good idea of how much their move will cost. With other moving companies charging by the piece or by weight, on-site estimates became a burden, and even then, there was no telling how much their move could total. Charging by the hour was efficient for everybody.

More importantly, as I would find out, Fast Company had built their reputation by not only being safe and inexpensive, but also, as the name implies, being the fastest company in town.

For my first day, I was assigned to work with Sammy and Bruno. While most of the thirty-two movers at Fast Company worked on permanent crews, Sammy and Bruno chose to come in and work with different people every day. They knew that it would give them a better chance of going out on a consistent basis, and, contrary to others’ preferences, they didn’t care who they were sent out with.

Although short, my first day at Fast Company did not go by without excitement. Curtis had instructed Sammy to let me drive, putting me behind the wheel in a walk-before-you-crawl type situation.

“He’s not gonna learn how to drive that thing from the passenger side,” Curtis announced. “Might as well go ahead and let him get his feet wet.”

Which was fine with me. I had always been an active learner: more do, less watch. I had come out of the womb jumping rope and reciting times tables, so I figured I was ready for anything. Unfortunately, however, to my passengers’ dismay, it turned out that I was a slow learner when it came to driving moving trucks. Expectations were low, and I wasn’t even meeting those. I was tripping over “the bar” that I had so pompously told Curtis I had set. There was nothing I could do. Believe me, I wanted to be a good driver. I’m a perfectionist, and I hate when I’m slow to catch on to things. But that truck No. 2 was an enigma. I would have rather worked on solving the Rubik’s Cube blindfolded. I knew right away it was going to take a while to get the hang of driving it. Whereas riders on the other trucks could sit back and relax on the way to and from their moves, our situation for that first day was different. Bruno took the window seat and control of the radio, while Sammy, with his long legs, squeezed in the middle and kept a very attentive eye on the road, constantly requesting that I go “just a little slower around the curves” or “maybe move a little bit more on this side of the double yellow line.”

I wasn’t embarrassed, though. Well, that’s a lie. Yes I was. While they had already known what they were getting into with my inexperience, and even with Sammy’s upbeat, understanding attitude I still felt so unfit to be driving that truck.

But things started to look up when we got to the move. First of all, the young lady we moved was beautiful. Gorgeous. Shannon O’Bannon. I’ll never forget that name—one of those names that makes you want to dance and sing, maybe sit down and write a nursery rhyme. Which, in fact, Bruno was doing in between trips in and out of the house.

Shannon O’Bannon had a fat fanny, whose rumps were soft as dough.

Everywhere that Shannon went, the boys were sure to go…

She was twenty-five, younger than the typical Fast Company customer and was already divorcing her husband, whom she had caught cheating.

“That mother fucker.” She pepped up real quick. “I hired one of those private investigators like you see on TV, and we installed cameras and microphones all over the place. We followed him around in the undercover van for three days. I got that bastard good.”

Well, that explained the cheating, but she was still beautiful. My first thought when we