The Idler

Running Blind

A few years ago I worked as a runner (ie. dogsbody) for a TV company. The accounts department was in a narrow building on 4 floors plus an attic and a basement.

One day the management decided to renovate the building, so we runners had to shift all the furniture, files etc from floor to floor. Carrying a (full) filing cabinet or colossal oak desk up four flights of narrow stairs is by no means easy, but the worst was yet to come.

They decided we should move all the long-term files kept in the attic into the basement, so we crawled into this tiny, dusty space, picked up the boxes which invariably decomposed on contact and shifted twenty years’ worth of vat forms to the newly done-up basement.

After two weeks of this backbreaking work, everything was sorted. The building looked respectable, all the files were where they should have been and we were proud(ish) of a job well done.

Then disaster struck.

Two days later the sewer under the basement burst, clogged by the grease from the chip shop next door, and our brand-new archive was flooded with raw sewage. We donned wellies, masks and gloves and waded in to rescue the sodding files, fighting the constant urge to puke from the revolting smell. As well as grabbing all the paperwork, we had to use brooms to keep the six-inch-deep tide of shit away. None of us could stand to be in the room for more than five minutes, and it took us three days of this to get everything out.

However bad this seemed to us, though, it was surely nothing compared to what the poor sod from the council who had to fix the sewer went through - he was there for about two weeks.

Doug Brown