Moving in Switzerland? A plug for Kaylan Umzug

I recently moved apartment in Zurich, and wanted to take a moment to plug the service offered by the removal company that I used, Kaylan Umzug.

The provided a full service move; packing, furniture disassembly, hand-over cleaning with guarantee, rubbish diposal, and furniture re-assembly at the new apartment. And they were fast -- my 6 room apartment (approx 50m³ of material) was cleared in 4h30m (8a-12.30p), and it took the same amount of time to unload and reassemble at the new place (1p-5.30p). Despite having to get furniture up to the second floor in an elevator only large enough for four people.

Other things that I liked about the service:

• They provided a fixed price quote. Other companies that I spoke to quoted per hour. This always worries me, in that it gives them an incentive to proceed a little slower.
• There were no hidden charges in Kaylan's quote -- VAT and insurance were included. Other companies broke them out as separate items, or left them as small print (i.e., VAT was not included, the customer was encouraged to get their own insurance). Also, unlike other companies their quote included all the necessary packing material.
• Every other company quoted the move as taking two days. Kaylan did it in one (and were faster than their original time estimate.

Finally, they were towards the cheaper end of the quotes that I received. The quote broke down in to three components.

1. The move itself. CHF 4,560 (as already mentioned, inc. VAT, insurance, packing material, etc).
2. The cleaning. CHF 1,500. This was marginally more expensive than the quote from my regular cleaning co., but I was happy to pay the extra to only deal with one company, as well as not have two companies getting in each other's way during the move.
3. Rubbish disposal. CHF 600. I had approximately 8m³ of assorted junk that I no longer wanted and had failed to sell (or was too crappy to sell) that needed disposing.

Overall, probably the least stressful move that I've ever done. The worst part was hanging around while they efficiently moved everything, feeling rather like a spare wheel.

Holy crap, I’m moving to Switzerland!

It's been a bit quiet around here for the last couple of months. A quick brain dump.

In February I left my job helping to run the mail systems at Citigroup, having sorted myself out with a contracting role doing software development in Perl (with some Autosys and Murex mangling on the side) for the nice people at Brevan Howard. Quite definitely some of the nicest people I've had the pleasure of working with in the financial industry. If you're a London-based Perl developer looking for work and the opportunity for a contract with them comes up, jump at it.

Along the way I finally got around to sorting myself out with a Flickr account, and you can see my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikclayton/. Not something I've written much about, but that may change in the future.

Anyway, that proved to be temporary. No, they didn't fire me. Instead, in two days time I jump on a plane bound for Zurich, to start working as a site reliability engineer for Google Switzerland.

I was over there a couple of weeks ago as part of a preview-cum-orientation trip, which coincided with the once-every-three-years Züri Fäscht (Zurich Festival), so I took the opportunity to snap a few shots of fireworks.







Anyway, I hope to write more next week about the process, useful sites for people undergoing a similar move, and so on. That, and getting back to contributing to projects like Subversion -- my free time has been practically non-existent for the past 4 months or so, and that's something that I've let slip.