Schlepaphobia

Schlepaphobia: an uncontrollable and irrational fear of entrusting your things to complete strangers, who will haul it half-way across the country with little to no oversight.


Now that Jen and I are moving again, we get to go through all the hassle of packing everything up and hiring a moving company and all that jazz.

This whole situation is exacerbated by how quickly this is all happening. I'm leaving in less than a month, now. And because of how quickly the end of August is approaching, I'll be leaving first, once I'm finished with a summer class that I'm teaching, and Jen will stay out here a little while longer to train her replacement and continue to pack stuff up.

For reasons that make me roll my eyes and sigh with exasperation, I'm flying to Chicago, instead of driving. That means that I'm going to have to carefully choose the things I bring with me and then wait about a month for everything else to get to Illinois. And then I have to trust the airline not to lose the things I do decide to bring.

Really, all I'm worried about is my dissertation materials. I'll probably have a few boxes of books that I can entrust to UPS or something like that. But I also have a boat-load of student papers that are the foundation of my study. So my dilemma is that I need to bring them with me in order to continue working on my dissertation, but I'll be damned if I'm going to trust them to airport baggage handlers or to UPS. I can't even imagine losing those, and all I can hear when I think about putting them on a plane is that they were scattered across the tarmac at SEA-TAC or that somebody put them on a plane to Orlando because they didn't know that ORD was the airport code for O'Hare (that actually happened to me once).

So anyway, I'm sure it will just boil down to me making a set of photocopies or spending the time to scan in the hundreds of pages on our ancient scanner to make a pdf file or something like that. But I'm worried because it's one of the few things I own that is truly irreplaceable.