Last week, the packout for our PCS move to Burma began on Monday and lasted through Wednesday. It was longer and more nerve-wracking than I expected — probably our longest and most stressful packout ever… I’m glad it’s over!
The packout was a three-day ordeal marked by constant decision-making, physical exhaustion, and the unsettling experience of watching strangers pack up everything you own and take it away.
Moving house is disorienting because it upends your sense of stability and control. The familiar rhythms of daily life are replaced with chaos — objects lose their usual places, routines are disrupted, and the space that once felt like home becomes unrecognizable. The disorder of transforming a clean, functional home into a scattering of suitcases and leftover odds and ends is deeply disorienting—especially as you keep misplacing things in the confusion.
I really don’t recommend moving by airplane, trying to keep all your electronics, jewelry, civil documents, and months of prescriptions on your person as judgy tourists look at your carry-ons and pets and wonder why you can’t pack lighter.
But in choosing this life, we’ve—at least for now—accepted the trade-off of stability at home for novelty and adventure. So we do our best to meet the temporary inconvenience of moving with a sense of humor.
This particular packout followed weeks of stress and nonstop activity as I prepared for my Burmese EOT and we then traveled out of town for FACT training. In other words, we had little time or bandwidth to get the house—or ourselves—ready for the movers. Even a week before the packout, my husband was still prioritizing yard work for a house that would soon no longer be our responsibility, while I was racing between appointments, cancelling subscriptions, and selling our second car, trying to wrap up our 3.5 years in Virginia as neatly as possible.
We did the best we could the weekend we returned from FACT to corral things that shouldn’t be packed, and sort into categories the things that should: UAB, HHE, consumables, storage.
Day One
I’d had to follow up a couple of times with the company and my State Department move coordinator to figure out what time the movers planned to arrive. Through these communications I learned the move coordinator had forgotten to actually hit the button on authorizing the company to move us, but no matter! /sarcasm
On day one of the packout, around 8:30 a.m., four movers arrived and were ready to get to work packing up our 450 lbs of Unaccompanied Air Baggage (UAB), and several hundred pounds each of Household Effects (HHE) and Consumables. The night before, V and I checked into a temporary apartment and brought our cat along with the suitcases we planned to take to Burma, alleviating the concern the cat could escape during the packout or that the movers could pack our wallets.
There was a bit of a language barrier, because all four of the crew were Spanish-speaking. But two spoke and understood English reasonably well and that helped a lot. Unfortunately, the team lead in charge did not speak English and was unable to explain the growing pile of items they “couldn’t” pack, including items they spent a lot of time packing but then unpacked!
After a flurry of a dozen emails and phone calls back and forth between me, my move coordinator at the Department, and the moving company, I managed to get the movers to repack the alcohol — necessitating a tedious and unexpected itemized inventory for customs.
But despite our move coordinator saying small aerosols were OK, the company’s verdict was “no” on our dozen-plus cans of aerosolized bug spray, deodorants, and cooking sprays. After 90 minutes of tension in the house and delays in wrapping up the day, as the team lead waited for his boss and his boss’s boss to return his calls, I ceded the position. It appeared we had gotten bad information from our move coordinator, so I resolved to return as many aerosols as I could to the store. The movers were nice to us generally and were lenient with letting us pack some consumables that, um, weren’t exactly brand new and unopened. And we of course, tipped them and treated everyone to a delicious lunch.
Day one ended with the house emptied of all items accompanying us to Rangoon. No, actually, come to think of it, it ended with me identifying a couple small items that missed the packout and needed to be mailed, and then we went out to dinner.
Day Two
On the second day, three movers from a different company arrived to pack the bulk of our possessions for storage. This was the day closets and dressers were emptied, the wedding china and all our glassware was wrapped, and books disappeared into boxes. As they worked, we worked — V in the garage, me bringing out the original boxes for appliances, scrubbing up shelves and drawers and the fridge, and generally running around and keeping an eye on things. We again sprung for everyone’s lunch and tipped each mover.
In retrospect, the movers’ desire to get done by 3 p.m. and return to the warehouse to do their paperwork was not in our interest. If I could go back, I would have had them take apart the beds and desks, wrap the bookshelves and other large furniture, and pack the garage. It turned out later they were supposed to wrap everything, so all the crew on the third day would have to do would be inventory and crating.
Day Three
I could summarize this day by saying that three movers arrived with a truck in the morning, and 11 hours later, 10 movers were on-site and nearly four trucks were filled as everyone frantically tried to finish our packout before dark. It made tipping and lunch ambiguous and expensive, and for the majority of the day, I was really unclear as to whether the packout would extend into a fourth day, delaying my departure on a 3,000-mile solo road trip to drop off my car on the west coast in order to avoid placing it in government storage.
I blame the company’s virtual pre-packout survey entirely for the chaos and not any individual movers, who all worked really hard. If the moving company’s admin staff do not accurately estimate the weight and volume of an officer’s household items during the survey, the company won’t send the correct amount of packing materials nor staff the job appropriately. It’s a garbage-in, garbage-out situation, and that’s clearly what happened.
I know the handling of day three led to a lot of delays, stress, and dismay for everyone. It was uncomfortable feeling like we had “too much stuff,” when in reality, we have the same amount of stuff any American family living in a house has — and likely neater and more organized because of the number of times we have had to move it all.
I can only hope at whatever future time we receive our stored effects back, including bedroom and dining room furniture we’ve paid five figures for in the aggregate — that they’re all in good shape. I will admit this packout made me reflect for the umpteenth time on all the ways FSOs can take personal losses and damages in this career, and feel grateful we can afford personal property and transit insurance.
I felt an enormous amount of relief on Wednesday night when the last crate was nailed shut, I had signed all the forms, and the last moving truck disappeared around the corner. The house was dirty, hot, and full of mosquitos from the movers propping the front door open all day.
V and I spent Wednesday night tidying up the house until almost nothing was left but a few cleaning supplies and rags. He returned the next day and spent the entire day—from 8:30 a.m. until just before midnight—doing a deep clean that ensured we got our security deposit back during the landlord’s Friday walkthrough.
V and I finished the night sitting in a park near our temporary apartment building, eating ice cream from Coldstone Creamery and talking about the stressful shit-show the packout had been. All around us, people walked their dogs, pushed strollers, or sauntered hand-in-hand towards the nearby restaurants and movie theatre. I assumed that at home, their possessions were neatly put away inside homes that were not in transition as ours was. I felt the usual mix of bittersweet feelings: free, untethered, longing for stability.
Our sixth Department packout was in the books, and the road to Burma lay wide open ahead of us.
Collecting Postcards 