My moving horror story: Several years ago, our Housing Authority Office was being merged into the Social Services Department (the new department was called Housing & Human Services or HHS), which caused a move into a new location, a building that was purchased from Kaiser Permanente and refurbished to contain both County Offices and a Free/Low Cost medical clinic on the ground floor. At the last possible moment, it was decided that many of their records were to go into my off-site storage via Iron Mountain. The department complied with my policies, I thought, including sending me a list of each box to be stored with Record Series, dates & the contents of each box specified.  There were 103 boxes being sent - not a huge amount for me, but substantial, especially as I was a one-person operation. (Now I'm all the way up to one and a third.)  I entered each box into my database (Versatile by Zasio Enterprises) and created labels for each box, as well as associating each box with an Iron Mountain label.

When I reached the Housing office I discovered that quite a few of the boxes  didn't match up with the list they had sent and that the number of boxes had somehow increased from 103 to 113. What was worse, the movers - and Iron Mountain - were coming the next day.  Being not important or powerful enough to say "No", I ended up matching up the boxes as best I could, using the rest of the labels to mark whichever box and writing down the contents so that I could update my database and taking the other 10 boxes back to my office (six in the back seat, two in the trunk, two in the front passengers seat) where I completed adding them and had Iron Mountain pick them up there.

My other moving horror story took place earlier when my Records Center was closed and box storage was out-sourced, but I'm not going there as thinking about it still brings on tears.

David R. McLallen, ECMp
Boulder County Records Manager
Boulder, CO

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