One bad mover

In Dubai, summer is moving season. Leases end, families shift a few streets over or across the city, and a small army of men with vans and rolls of tape spends July carrying other people's lives up and down stairwells.

Most of them are careful. But anyone who has moved more than twice has a story about the other kind: the crew that quoted one figure and demanded another once the sofa was in the van, the wardrobe that arrived in pieces, the phone that stopped being answered.

That crew does not only cost the family that hired it. It costs every mover in the city. The next family books more nervously, haggles harder, watches every box and assumes the worst of whoever turns up. The careful crew pays for the careless one, without ever having met them.

There are two ways for the trade to respond. The first is to treat it as an industry. Everyone for himself, the customer should have checked, our name is ours and theirs is theirs. Keep quiet, compete on price, and let the buyer take the risk.

The second is to treat it as a profession. In a profession, a bad job done by anyone in the trade is understood as a bad job done by the trade. So the people who care hold a line together. They say out loud what a fair quote looks like. They refuse to stay silent about the crew that holds furniture hostage. They agree on what a customer can expect from any of them.

The difference is not in the van or the tape. It is in whether the people doing the work believe they are offering a service that rests on trust, or running a business where trust is the customer's problem.

Only one of those makes the family less nervous next July.