The Couch

They were going to bring it up the outside of the building.

By Neil Solomon · 3 min read

We bought an apartment in Mexico City. It came furnished, and most of it was good. A couple of pieces weren't us, so we ordered new couches.

I measured the doorway. I measured the couch. I measured the hallway. I'm careful about that sort of thing. I knew it would fit, I knew how it would sit in the room, and I was right about all of it.

The old couches were already promised to my wife's family. I have a rule: when something new comes in, the old one goes out. Free, to somebody. It doesn't move to another room. It doesn't go to another property. It goes.

So on delivery day there were three men, two couches, and no way to change my mind.

Two ways up. The elevator, and the stairs.

They tried the elevator. The door wouldn't close.

So, the stairs. Wide, straight, we're only a few floors up. Easy.

They got to the first turn.

And I looked up and there was my couch, hanging in the air, wedged into the corner of the stairwell, three men underneath it scratching their heads. And all I could think was: if that thing lets go, it is coming down those stairs and it is going to kill somebody.

I measured the door. I measured the hallway. I was right about both.

I never thought to measure the stairs.

The men started talking it through. Take the legs off? Back it down? Turn it? None of the ideas cost anything, and none of them was the expensive way.

Five minutes later there were three of them standing on my balcony holding ropes.

They were going to bring it up the outside of the building.

I thought: somebody is going to fall. Or that couch is going to let go and land on the sidewalk.

And then I thought: this would never happen in my country.

I'd seen the trucks in Spain: a ladder up the side, a little conveyor that runs your furniture right up to the window. Very clean. Very engineered.

There's no truck like that here. Here there's rope, and there are people.

Then I noticed there weren't three men anymore. There were eight.

They'd gone down and recruited them off the street. For a tip.

I said, this is insane.

My wife said, calm down, honey. They've got it.

I could not calm down. I sat on a stool in the kitchen with my head in my hands, trying not to watch and completely unable to stop, while eight men I had never met hauled my couch up four floors on a rope and swung it over the balcony rail.

I don't think I breathed.

Then it was in the living room, being set in place as if nothing had happened. The men took the old couches out the same way, over the rail and down on the ropes. We paid the men, about US$20 in tips, and gave them food and drinks. And that was it.

Here is what I learned.

I had tried to get everything right in a situation I had never been in. I measured the door, the hallway and the couch. And still, people who come from a different paradigm do it differently.

I came from an American paradigm. It can't be done. Someone is going to get hurt. I am going to get sued. Everything I had grown up with said no, and no was the only answer it had.

The men had another answer. We will just ask people on the street, give them a small amount of money, and they will be glad to help. And they were. Eight men I had never met were glad to help, and nobody got hurt.

Both ways of thinking were looking at the same stairwell. I had measured everything I knew to measure. I had not thought to ask how someone else would look at it.

Have you stood next to someone looking at the same wall and heard a different answer? Tell us in the comments what you found. Someone reading may be about to carry their own couch up a stairwell.