So much happened in one day and I am very tired after so much work so I’ll try to summarize what happened today (9/4/2021).
In the morning, my dad and I got picked up by an Uber by my house and went to the local Home Depot. We had a lot of moving ahead so we decided to rent a Penske truck in order to facilitate this process (and also to stock up on some bubble wraps).
Before the actual moving began, we had to drive an hour to a house near Lakewood, New Jersey to pick up a table and chairs since we had contacted them before on a Facebook selling group. The table and chairs were made out of wood so we had to wrap the furniture with some bubble wraps so that it wouldn’t damage the wood if the Penske moved too fast. On the way back my dad drived slowly on the highway so that there would be minimal damage to the table and chairs.
After we rested a bit and had lunch, we had to do the actual moving at about 2 PM. After we arrived in the US on August 25th, we had a lot of stuff, but in reality, over the course of two years, we had put half of our stuff into an ExtraSpace Storage garage because we couldn’t ship so much stuff back to Taiwan. Thus, after two years, we had to get all of that stuff back.
Previously, we had rented a car and managed to get approximately 20% of the boxes back to our apartment. However, the storage had a lot more stuff and I needed to start school soon, so we decided to clean out the garage today.
Indeed, we got out all of the boxes and miscellaneous personnel into the truck but there remained one problem: we had two mattresses and three bed frames; the frames were much easier to carry out, but one of the mattresses was king-sized.
We had originally hired some U-Haul helpers to move these heavy mattresses but during the moving process, we decided to refund them because they couldn’t make it before 5 PM, which was about the time when ExtraSpace closed. So we (me and my dad) had to carry them onto the Penske truck itself.
We (it was actually impromptu) decided to leave the boxes and other stuff on the truck and split moving the mattresses into two parts; we would move the smaller mattress and two frames onto the truck, drive back home, move it there, drive to the storage and move the king-sized mattress and one single bed frame.
After our first round trip we had already put the single frame; all that was left was the huge king-sized mattress. It was the only thing that remained in the ExtraSpace garage; everything else was either at home or on the Penske truck. And boy, was it heavy!
Since we lived on the second floor of an apartment with no elevators, I devised a strategy for heavy, soft material like mattresses: we would use a rolling technique. Two or more people would roll the mattress up the stairs, and doing so would be more efficient than carrying it by hand because it was so heavy. This is a use of problem-solving skills in real life, as I will go in more detail below.
We tried to apply the same technique and did roll the king-sized bed all the way out of the storage space and onto the truck until… it got stuck halfway.
My dad wanted to give up, roll the mattress back to the garage and wait a couple more days until he could hire people to move this heavy bed. It was a possible plan because we were so exhausted after using all of our strength to move it out. Instead, I wanted to get this mattress into the truck since this would leave our ExtraSpace storage empty, which was what we wanted. So I diagnosed the problem and figured out that there were too many boxes at the front and middle of the cargo space, so we cleared that area and tried the rolling technique again. This time, we managed to successfully roll it in and thus transport all that stuff back home.
When we got home we, again, rolled the mattress upstairs. It was really tedious work because of how heavy it was, though my mom went downstairs to help us a bit.
After moving the frames and the beds we spent an hour moving all of the luggage and stuff back to our house. And boy, was it a lot of stuff!
In the end, our family had a good celebratory dinner and we all had a good night’s sleep.
This whole experience really taught me a lot of problem-solving skills and concepts. In order to tackle a problem(even in the real world), here are the fundamental steps you must undergo:
- Identify the problem.
- Figure out some solutions.
- If needed, choose the solution that would tackle this problem a lot more fruitfully.
- Execute the solution carefully.
I greatly emphasize this bolded word because if you are not accurate, all your work will be worth 0%. This applies a lot to AIME(American Invitational Mathematics Exam), as I have sillied a lot of problems because of bad calculations.
As for the case of this moving process, we had sometimes failed to roll it in because of ‘bad aim’. In other words, we had to position the mattress carefully enough so that it would roll into the truck at the right angle, or else it would go off-track and completely miss the vehicle.
Hopefully you enjoyed reading this article and apply your problem-solving skills to everyday life!