History of a move, and of business organization

Since about February, blogger and spouse have been in the process of buying a new home, selling the old home, and organizing a downsizing, a staging, a sale, a purchase, a move, and all that goes with those processes. We actually find ourselves owning both the old property and the new property for a couple more weeks, which means -- this all happening in Toronto -- we are temporarily either rich beyond our wildest dreams, or just more in debt than we ever expected to be at this stage of life. (Mostly the latter.)  It is all remarkably complicated, And time-consuming.

Hence the lighter than usual productivity at this blog over the last few months and particularly the last couple of weeks.

I don't think a history of this move will be forthcoming.  But several times I found myself reflecting on the history of business organization.

We used a smallish real estate agency, about ten people altogether.  We used a local moving company, where the leader of the moving crew had his family name as the logo on the truck. We used a two person law office. All of these were superbly organized, courteous, prompt in executing, and always completely in command of what they had to do.

We also used a major bank (let's give it the initials RBC) for the bridge financing we needed, and a telecom giant (initials BELL) to shift our internet/television from old address to new. The property finance kid at the bank was prompt and competent, and the tech who came to do the telecom installation seemed like a master to me.

But getting the bank's remote Closing Centre simply to hit Send on the crucial financing documents very nearly sank the whole transaction, and finally had us more or less occupying the bank manager's office and refusing to move until we got confirmation that our lawyer had received what she needed.  And the effort it took to get the telecom's service centre to actually make the booking for a tech visit and then ensure that the tech department actually knew about the booking, and...  well, I don't even want to go into it.  Blogging might have been more active had we actually had an internet connection for several days there.

In the history of business organization, the large corporation has decisively beaten the small local one in almost every field. But if that is the case, how is it that the small ones still work so well, and the big ones so badly?

There are still a hell of a lot of unopened boxes around here, and still at least one major banking/legal transaction to bring to a close. (The one scheduled to obliterate all that debt!)  So no promises about the pace of blogging in the near future, but I'm becoming hopeful.  Hey, it's July and we haven't even mentioned the Tour yet.  Stick around.

Move, if it's right for you. We're glad we did.  But don't underestimate the complications!

Update, July 12:  Archivist Charles Levi notes that among the fields not yet dominated by large organizations is librarians.  I tried to counter with the size of the Toronto public library system (not that I have ever found it inefficient, quite the contrary) but Charles insists that because of its branch structure.