The Hustle MacGuffin

The 18^th of last month was the five-year anniversary of the end of my company. Another way of looking at it: I’ve been not running the company half the length of time that I did run it.

I thought about, and then rejected, some sentimental post about it. The last five years have been like getting your arm stuck in an industrial wood chipper at 5:00 PM on a Friday, and you have to wait all weekend for a coworker to come and help you out of it. I just don’t have the mental space to dwell on it anymore. I’ve moved on.

Well, until last night when Facebook served up one of its memories, probably from one of its Hell-based data centers. 

It’s a pic of my old Ford Ranger, loaded down with an entire two-bedroom apartment’s worth of stuff. This must have been from 2008 or 2009, just before I obtained my first fleet of grown-up moving trucks. It was from that early time where the side hustle was morphing into an actual business. This pic shows the day that thrust me from the side hustle mentality to “business owner” mentality. “We’re going to need a bigger truck.”

I did insane stuff like this routinely. It’s just what I had to do. At the time, I didn’t have a reliable system to estimate an apartment’s volume of “stuff,” so I just took customers’ vague word for it. “Oh, I dunno, it’s really not that much.”

Me: “Cool! Sounds like you’ll just need me and another guy. I’ll bring my little trailer just in case.”

More often than not, I’d end up driving past the Washington Memorial with a couch on my roof.