Walk into a furniture store with a folding luggage cart and a set of bungie cords. Walk out with a 6ft by 3ft wooden bookshelf rolling behind you. Carry/lug/roll the bookcase a mile down Valencia street. I haven’t seen so many wide eyes since the last time I wore a suit on BART.

In Manhattan, this wouldn’t really raise any eyebrows: the collapsable luggage cart is a vital part of the urban warrior toolkit there, and it’s not at all unusual to see people using them to move everything up to 10k-BTU air conditioners, coffee tables and the odd refrigerator. Here not so much apparently.

(Of course, having gotten all butched up by moving furniture using only muscle and simple physics, I found out at the end of the trip that it’s physically impossible to get the damn thing up the stairs by myself: the entryway is just too narrow. Oops.)