Lifestyle outside the box
Posted by Guhan | Filed under thoughts
This post is coming in a little too late, but better late then never. Like most DINK’s ( dual income no kids ) working in the high tech industry, we too decided to go experience the green bill fantasy in the silicon valley. Moving out and settling into a life is harder than one thinks. When you go over the procedures and various relocation service provider introduction mails, you tend to believe that the whole thing is going to be like a walk in the cloud. But you realize that that while “walk in the cloud” may get some literary applause, the practicality of it is actually quiet a daunting task. So in the last 4 months, its been a lot of paper work, coordination, set up, tear down, negotiation, decisions and compromises. But the one that seemed to fascinate me the most was the how our lifestyle went in and came out of cardboard boxes. In an earlier blog post, I talked about how we ended up packing most of the stuff we had into 28 boxes. Now after coming over to the US of A, it was time to unpack all the boxes and set up a home away from home. But this time around, it was not just the 28 odd boxes we had shipped from India, it was a whole new set of boxes that brought in more stuff that seems to define a lifestyle we want. Boxes seem to take so much importance, that even the choice of house was dictated by how much box storage room the apartment home had. So no prizes for guessing, our home does have a very large storage room. Putting stuff into a cardboard box is kinda interesting at first, because you tend to work your brain trying to optimize on how much stuff you can put in. Its like putting together a puzzle, where each piece is an object of different size,weight and fragility level that you intelligently place to minimize the number of boxes used, but still optimize the quality of the shipment. This is what fascinates me, its the engineer in me who wants to solve things. But the interest level sticks on only for a few boxes. After that its just the need to get the job done.
Everyone will agree that un-boxing is always a much more interesting part. I would like to call it the “rip open” syndrome ( that was not too intelligent ) Its the kid in you who acts out the opening the presents / gifts every time you want to empty the contents of a box and its always much faster to rip open a packaging than putting it together. So when our shipment did arrive, everything was unpacked within a matter of 20 minutes.
As I said before, our settling into the home away from home was characterized by the arrival of more stuff in boxes. In an economy that is defined by your purchasing power, we too were seduced into the materialistic craving . We were warned enough about the “do it yourself” lifestyle of the west, the Ikea nesting instinct. So this just means more stuff comes intelligently packed in cardboard boxes. So as we fed our craving, the boxes just piled up in our large storage room. Some stuff we needed, some we really could have done with out. There was some stuff that was just impulse purchase and few more luxury items. But every thing big or small came in a cardboard box.
As engineers we are rewarded for thinking outside the box, the reward for relocation is a lifestyle outside the box.
Tags: moving box settle thoughts, usa
2 Responses to “Lifestyle outside the box”
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yosee Says:
January 2nd, 2011 at 11:05 pmI guess you had a lot of fun, opening boxes, like a prolonged X’Mas ritual !
Good that you have ample storage space for the boxes.
Enjoyed reading your thoughts on boxing and unboxing. -
Dibs Says:
January 3rd, 2011 at 3:17 amSmart move getting acco with storage!! We didn’t …result, we still live ‘out of suitcases’ and ‘around card boxes’!! Matter of time before we “live in” cardboard boxes”
