As I sat outside my son's school waiting for him to come out, I stared at the dumpster next to me and memories of a terrible morning when I was working as an Optometrist in Sheffield came flooding back to me.
I am never late for anything. I remember as a child the feeling of panic knowing that we were about to walk into an event and we were so late that everyone would turn round and look at us as we shuffled in trying not to be noticed. This meant, when I was old enough to have control over when I set off to get somewhere, I would always leave at least fifteen minutes emergency time. This would drive Dominic crazy as we would turn up to someone’s house for dinner, as he put it, “so early that the householders were scrambling to get dressed”.
Getting to work was no different. I would often find myself sitting in the car park reading a magazine or sorting out some paperwork waiting for an appropriate time to go into the practice I was working in that day. This was such a frequent occurrence that I always had something in my car that would occupy me for the time it would take to be regarded as punctual rather than ridiculously early. One crisp spring morning in Sheffield was no different. On the passenger seat of my car lay a small pile of white and brown envelopes, each containing a bill to be paid or a check to be paid in. I wrote checks for each of the bills and placed them in envelopes which I then addressed and placed a stamp in the top right hand corner. On top of these envelopes to be posted I placed the three or four checks which had arrived over the few previous days and which I intended to take to the bank during my lunch hour to deposit in our account.
Just as I finished it became an appropriate time to go into work so I picked up the envelopes and checks in one hand and the empty envelopes and waste paper in the other. Just by the door at the back of the practice was a huge industrial wheelie bin which sat on the edge of the car park waiting to be emptied by the council. It had obviously only just been emptied because as I reached up over the top to throw in the waste paper it fluttered down to the bottom where it landed against the dusty plastic. Just as the paper left my hand landed I glanced down at my other hand to see all the waste paper clutched tightly in my fist and the horrific realisation dawned on me that several hundred pounds worth of checks to be paid into my account now sat at the bottom of a very tall wheelie bin with all my bills to be paid. I could not afford to just loose this money to the depths of the bin and was horrified at the thought of trying to get replacements. Even if I did get replacements it would be time consuming and, at this point so early in my career and with Dominic still doing his PhD, money was tight and we did not have time to wait for new checks. I knew I could not just reach into the bin and pull them out as the lip of the huge receptacle was on level with my eyes, in fact I had had to stand on my tip toes to peer in and confirm the inevitable reality that the checks were indeed far from my grasp. I looked for something to stand on to try and reach in, but there was nothing around so I decided the only thing to do was to pivot myself on the edge of the bin so that I could reach down and pick up the checks which mercifully lay close to the side nearest to me. I dragged the bin, which was on four sturdy wheels, over to a wall and pulled myself up on to the edge of the bin, walking my feet up the wall until my stomach was resting on its lip and I was stretched out almost like a human see saw. I began to pivot downwards into the bin, stretching my arms out before me and towards the checks. As my fingers reached to within a couple of inches of the papers below the inevitable happened. The weight of my body pointing towards the bottom of the bin was just too much and I slid headfirst into the abyss below. Now it had not been too difficult to get myself into the bin, even though that was not my intention, but like the checks it was proving a little more difficult to me get out of the bin! The edge which I had been pivoting on was made up of a fairly narrow sheet of heavy duty plastic. It had been fairly easy to pull myself up using the wall and having a firm dry rough surface to lodge my feet against but there was no wall in the bin and since it was several feet wide and made of slippy smooth plastic I was unable to use the opposite side as I had the wall. I tried and tried to pull myself up until I fairly soon realised my life may end as a pile of trash.
Shivering, dirty and despondent, I crouched down in the corner of the bin and let the feelings of hopelessness overcome me. Suddenly the checks seemed less valuable now that I had given up my freedom to retrieve them. Then the bin began to move. I toppled over into the filthy puddle of god knows what that inhabited the bottom of the bin and then fought to get to my feet. As my eyes peeked over the top of my refuse prison they met with the eyes of Mark the dispensing option who had just arrived to start his day. The Sheffield practice was in the dodgy end of town so it was quite feasible that a drunk or a tramp may have some how ended up in the bin. However, it was still quite a shock for Mark, who gave a sharp intake of breath, which he then released as a loud “what?” as he realised that the crazy person in the bin was in-fact his work colleague. After a short interrogation to ascertain that I had not spent the whole of the previous night in amongst the rubbish and just how I had come to the conclusion that a large council wheelie bin would be a suitable place for a professional woman to begin her work day, he then found a way to help me out.
The small amount of workplace teasing as I attempted to clean myself up should have been the end of the matter, but that was not to be. When the Coop monthly employee’s newsletter arrived a few weeks later nestled amongst the stories of record profits and reports of employee fun runs was a poem that told of one of the better paid members of staff who spent their mornings at the bottom of a council bin. My new national fame was far from welcome and my fear of wheelie bins was not one I would easily overcome!