Here we are. It's the end of August. The moving trucks are taking up parking spaces. If you're lucky, you might be able to pick up a free discarded couch off the street. If you're unlucky, it has bedbugs.

Yes, it's moving season in Somerville and most of Boston.

If I had a dime for every horrible moving experience I've lived through, I'd probably have, I don't know, 40 cents or something.

One of the worst experiences was moving out of Switzerland, where we lived for three and a half years. Anyone who's moved out of an apartment in Switzerland will know what I'm talking about. The inspection. There's a checklist. A multi-page checklist. If you ever meet a Swiss person with a checklist, gird your loins.

In our case, the landlord came over with a white cloth and rubbed the cloth on almost every surface in the apartment, checking for dirt and dust. She wiped the inside of the dishwasher. She looked under the sinks to check for dust on the bottom sides of the pipes. She took apart the faucets to make sure there wasn't lime buildup in them. With a Swiss moving-out inspection, if anything isn't clean enough, you get fined. It took two weeks to clean up that place, and I was a broken man at the end of it.

Then there was that apartment in Cambridge that didn't have a working kitchen or bathroom, or properly installed windows. And it had dead rodents in the walls. We moved in and quickly moved out.

There was also that day in Brooklyn that could have gone terribly wrong had we not found a parking space for the U-Haul.

But I digress. We've all got moving horror stories. If you haven't irreversibly wedged a couch into the back stairwell of a triple-decker, you haven't really lived. The same is true it you haven't tried to hoist a mattress through a second-story bedroom window (a little trick: lift with your back, not your legs). 

In honor of this moving season, we want to know your moving horror stories. Let us know in the comments section. And remember to wrap those drinking glasses in something protective when you pack them into a paper bag and throw them into the back of your car. I've found underwear and socks do the trick.