It has been an exercise in patience and frustration. 99% of our worldly positions were shipped from Hamburg to Seattle via an ocean container ship. We went with a medium priced international moving company, Hasenkamp, that seemed to be professional enough, but appearances can be deceiving. On moving day, it was discovered that the moving company didn’t reserve a space for the container truck in front of our building on a very narrow, crowded, one-way cobblestone street. Parking reservation is the norm when moving apartments in Germany. We requested one when we first contacted the relocation company, so we figured it was their issue. The guys sent to pack were pissed at their office when they showed up and blamed the lady organizing everything from the comfort of her chair, saying that it had happened before… and for us not to worry, as they would work it out with the office. They called someone and swapped out for a smaller truck.

The movers were very meticulous in packing our stuff and overall we though they did a great job. We bought them lunch and drinks and stayed out of the way to let them just do their job. Fast forward 9-weeks and we get a demand for payment form the moving company, Hasenkamp, for $600 extra bucks ?!!??? This was after we had already paid them $6,500. The added bill was to pay for the labor hours for moving our goods from the small truck to the ocean freight container since without a reserved space the container truck couldn’t park on our street. The packers called the Hasenkamp office, not me, and told them to bring a smaller truck brought over. I thought it was no big deal and explained it all to the guy requesting funds, expecting an ’Oops, our bad!” sort of reply. Nope, what I got was a shit-storm of e-mail demanding the additional money and explanations defying all logic, arguing over how it was really our fault that the international logistics and moving company hadn’t reserved a parking spot after we contracted them to conduct a door to door move. Included in this correspondence were not-so-veiled threats about holding our goods until we paid, incurring $100 a day in additional costs. The whole time this was going on, Hasenkamp refused to give us the status and location of our property. It wasn’t until the very end of this terse correspondence that we discovered that our stuff had been in the US for weeks, had already cleared US Customs, and was about to start incurring storage fees at the port. It the end I had to pay ½ of their original requested amount, but MAN it pissed me off to do so!

The condition of our stuff was 95% perfect. Lots of padding and tape and cardboard. There were a couple of chipped glasses, two broken picture frames, odd scratches here and there, and the right arm of our couch got smashed/crushed in the container somehow. I took some pictures and turned it in on the insurance. (Five weeks later – no response from Hasenkamp. Fuck ‘em. I am turning it over to my insurer and will give them the Hasenkamp info. AllState will cut me a check and send Hasenkamp a nasty legal note demanding the funds for reimbursement. This is why one should have insurance – companies have entire legal departments to deal with these type of issues.)

I will link the whole demand for payment e-mail chain here. I will leave the company e-mail addresses intact on the mails, for general information purposes only, of course. It would be sad indeed if some automated web crawler spotted them and auto generated a mountain of SPAM/p0rn mail to those addresses… Hopefully I get a few web hits from someone searching for company information or from someone who is thinking about using Hasenkamp to move with. Additionally, I am going on a few of the expat forums in Europe and post all this again.

Make a customer happy and he MIGHT tell two people, piss a customer off and he WILL tell twenty…