Moving a Pool Table

My bachelor pad has been lacking one imperative ingredient... a pool table! My room mate and I found a good deal on an 8 foot pool table on craigslist a few weeks ago. It was valued new at over $1500 and we talked the seller from $250 to $150. The seller warned us several times that it was extremely heavy and would take several strong men to move the pool table from their second floor to my house. Being the confident optimist, I was positive that a few guys could easily get this monster pool table home. Once I assembled my "army" of three men, we loaded up in my truck and headed over to get the pool table. **If this were a movie, the current scene would freeze and the narrator would walk in front of the camera to let the audience know something the actors didn't. It's this little bit of insight that keeps the viewer engrossed in the train wreck that's about to unfold.** So.... we get to the house and are greeted by the seller and his wife. They take us upstairs to their game room and we see this magnificent and gigantic pool table. Nobody really says anything at first. We walk circles around the pool table as if we're stalking our prey and sizing it up for dinner. Words need not be spoken. An occasional eye contact with the person across the table said it all. Everyone was thinking the same thing. What did we just get ourselves into!? The entire pool table had to be disassembled down to the nuts and bolts. Fortunately that was the easy part. Figuring out a way to successfully get the 800 pound slab of slate down the stairs and into my truck was the catch. We did not have enough man power to do this safely. The slab was so heavy that we couldn't pick it up in the horizontal direction it was on the pool table. Otherwise, the slab would buckle right down the middle. We had to carry it vertically down the stairs to avoid breaking the pool table in half! After 2 1/2 hours of brainstorming, dismantling, and narrowly escaping being crushed by an 800 pound slab of slate, the pool table was in the back of my truck and we were headed home. It only took about half the time to reassemble the pool table as it did to take it apart. Four hours later, two boxes of pizza, and one hundred times "i'm so sorry ya'll," the pool table was finally in it's new home! Moral to the story is: Do not ever buy a pool table unless you have professional movers to do it for you. The juice definitely was not worth the squeeze.