too rich to move

Humorous term for someone's suddenly acquiring such a vast quantity of one or more desirable items that he feels like he's standing in the one single empty space in that child's "fifteen puzzle" sliding-tiles game, where you can only move one numbered block at a time... in other words, he's totally surrounded by enormous heaps of goodies, but he has absolutely zero “wiggle room” --- i.e., empty space in any direction --- to actually work with or process said newfound bounty. It'd be like if he’d meekly “asked around” to see if anyone had any scrap lumber, and then multitudes of people hastily converged on his property and generously heaped his entire yard so full of boards, beams, and plywood that he couldn't even walk out of his front door, or if a local home/business-owner who was “downsizing” had offered him an entire shed full of either huge bulging bags of returnables or pallets shrink-wrap-stacked to the ceiling with some of his favorite canned good or household items, but the building was so tightly crammed that there was only barely room to open the door a couple feet, thus preventing him from actually entering the shed and sorting through said windfall; in both cases he would be obliged to timidly "pick at the edges" of the mountain, tediously removing the items literally one-by-one.

Two classic examples of someone’s feeling “too rich to move” would be:
(1) if someone presented him with a huge 3-ring binder that was opened out flat, and the “presenter” had unthinkingly loaded BOTH “halves” of said binder with sheets “right up to the tops of the rings”, so that now the book’s unfortunate recipient could not actually turn any of the pages or even close the cover; he would therefore be obliged to procure another similar-sized binder and then carefully transfer half of the “overflowing” tome’s pages over into this second empty binder, so he could then peruse the work’s text a page at a time, or
(2) someone unfamiliar with how magnetic-tape players or film-projectors function had naively spliced two completely-filled reels of tape/film together, spindled the humongous spools onto a portable tape-deck or projector, and then proudly presented said “loaded-up ‘n’ ready” unit to another person, never realizing that said speechlessly-unnerved recipient would not be able to play said material "as-is", since there would literally be “nowhere for the strip of media to go” once it started rolling.

by QuacksO November 16, 2018

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