Well, the literally sophomoric time of year, mid-august, when a cluster fuck of U-Hauls, flat-beds, creeper vans, and concerned (albeit sardonic) parents descend upon our eclectic city to simultaneously move thousands of students is finally behind us. Anyone involved knows it was no cakewalk.
This was my first year partaking in Madison’s apartment exodus. Here are my three major life lessons of the past week: lifting with your back is unavoidable; being a professional mover would send you spiraling into a fiery debt of acupuncture and chiropractic bills; and most importantly, having every lease in the city end on August 14th and begin on the 15th is a tragically inefficient system.
I think my first two points explain themselves. But I want to investigate this all-encompassing lease schedule, because something about it really irks me.
Assuming the August 14-15 void was designed to make things easier for people, it likely made a lot of sense on the drawing board. Obviously nobody wants to prolong their move. Having everyone’s lease end at the same time means the moving process will take the least amount of days. Think of it this way: if someone’s lease ends on August 12th, but the lease on their next apartment doesn’t start for another week, moving will become an ever larger economic and temporal pain. And if the dates are far enough apart, it might even require two separate trips, which nobody wants.
So the solution is to have everyone move out and in on the same day. My immediate response to this was, “Where am I going to stay the night of the 14th?” To which someone might suggest a hotel, but I have a problem with that. I’m a college student so I really don’t want to pay for a hotel room in Madison. The gas to drive my parents’ mid-’90s conversion van from Chicago to Madison was bad enough. By this point I think we’ve all been programmed to sleep on any given floor or futon, so crashing at a friend’s house on the 14th seemed like my best option. The problem is when everyone moves at the same time, your friends all need a place to stay too. Setting up a campsite in Vilas Park for the night was a serious consideration. The day before moving, a friend thankfully said they could house my future roommates and me.
Maybe this system isn’t actually that bad and I’m just being a bit narcissistic, but after seeing people sitting outside for hours next to all of their possessions with nowhere to go, I feel there has to be a better way of going about this. Even if it’s just having leases end on two sequential days instead of just one, so only half as many people will be without a place to stay and parking in handicap spaces at any given time. Clearly it won’t be happening this year, since leases have already been signed, but rethinking this system may be a good idea sometime soon.