Radio Songs #57: Tidying Up

My final story about the courtyard where we used to park our cars at night to stop them getting nicked, or at least to stop manual labourers getting in, to warm their barnacles...

At the time, I was kind of half-seeing a girl who also worked at the station. It was complicated, as these things usually are, because she was still living with her ex at the time. She worked a couple of nights answering calls for the phone-in, and occasionally I'd hang around and keep her company, after I'd finished my work in the record library.

One night I ended up staying right to the end of the show, and because the presenter had to rush off at 2am, we volunteered to hang around and "tidy up". Well, the "tidying up" took some time... get your mind out of the gutter, it was very innocent "tidying up". Well, for the most part. But after about an hour, we were both ready to go, and as I'd offered her a lift home (like I said, complicated), she went out the side door to open the courtyard shutters while I went to set the alarm, and exited through the front.

Except when I got outside, she told me she'd been rather surprised to find the shutters to the courtyard already open. We puzzled over this a bit, then shut the shutter and went home.

The next day, I arrived at work to find two policemen on their way out. I was immediately invited into the boss's office and shown CCTV footage of the courtyard from the previous night...

Only one vehicle was parked in the courtyard all the time: the radio station's roadshow van. The CCTV footage I was forced to watch... for what seemed like an eternity... showed the phone-in presenter opening the shutters and heading off at 2am. She later claimed she'd left the shutters open because she thought we'd be straight behind her. She obviously hadn't factored in quite so much "tidying up".

About ten minutes later (they kindly fast-forwarded through the stuff where nothing happened), a local hoodlum was seen hanging around outside the open shutters to the courtyard. He peered in, he looked around, he gradually plucked up the nerve to venture inside. Took one look at my car: not worth the hassle, not even for his barnacles. But that nice shiny roadshow van... that looked pretty tempting.

So he broke into it. But there was apparently nothing inside worth nicking and he was hardly a master Gone In 60 Seconds car thief. Hotwiring looks a lot easier in films than it is in real life, apparently.

For the next ten minutes then, I watched in excruciating embarrassment as the grainy CCTV footage revealed the hoodlum pushing the roadshow van from one side of the courtyard to the other. He let off the handbreak and tried to get up enough speed so that he could run back to the cab, jump back inside and... I dunno, bump start it? (Again, not the brightest.) He then tried pushing it from the driver's side, with the door open and one hand on the steering wheel. Back and forth, back and forth... but he was never going to get it out of the courtyard. Eventually he crashed it into the wall, pretty much back where it had started out, and then... well, I guess he just sat there for a while, inside the vehicle, cogitating on what to do next. Until he heard the door to the side of the building opening, and somebody coming up the stairs from the basement... and he scarpered out of the tunnel and back to the delinquent's training academy.

Incredibly, my own part in this travesty went unquestioned. Most people, even the boss, saw the funny side and the damage to the roadshow vehicle was minimal. Even the police had had a good laugh. I'm not sure if they ever caught the gentleman responsible, but that was pretty much it for the "tidying up" after that. Story of my life.

Any excuse to play this...

Tell me - how long've you been combing your hair with a wrench?