One word? When seven would do…

We live along a fairly busy road. It links the A27 (which runs along the south coast and turns into the M27 at various points) with the A259 which is the actual coast road. It is used daily by all the emergency services, has the sea at one end as well as a large industrial estate and is a major bus route too.

Our lounge has two very large windows, one of which looks out over this road. Our house is set up off the road so the window is about 20 foot above the road level and slightly back. This enables us to watch everything going on outside without being looked in at. From my usual seat on the (newly mended) sofa I can see the road, the south downs, rooftops and a very large chunk of sky. That is probably what I most missed about this house when we lived in Manchester – the lack of sky.

Anyway as a self-confessed people watcher and nosy neighbour I love sitting and observing what goes on outside.

This morning a BT van pulled up and parked on the grass verge on the corner of our road. Out got BT man in his fluorescent jacket and working boots, cordoned off an area around a BT manhole’ lifted the lid and prepared to start work. I called the children over to watch incase it was something interesting going on (we get loads of educational mileage from watching streetlamp lightbulbs being changed, roads being resurfaced, windows being cleaned etc out of our window). He walked along the road a little and then walked back to his van. Then he appeared to realise he’d stood in dog poo. He did the little dog poo on my workboot shimmy of walking along the grass dragging his contaminated boot, then he pulled up a clump of grass and wiped his boot, then he walked to the kerb and scraped his boot. None of this seemed to be sorting his boot out so he started digging around in his van for something suitable to aid his plight.

He dug out a rag and wiped rather ineffectually with that. It didn’t seem to help so he found some wipes. The wipes were either inferior or the packet wasn’t properly opened, or they had dried out. Or they were of that advertised ‘pop up’ variety where they are supposed to ‘self feed’ with the next one instantly available but the pop up ness wasn’t working. I’m sure anyone who used baby wipes to clean their child’s bottom over an open and full nappy whilst holding their child’s legs out of the mess using the one handed two bottles of beer holding technique can sympathise with this. We’ve all been there – shitty nappy and baby arse, no free hands, crap wipes which won’t come out of the packet or run out mid clean up.

So he dug out a screwdriver from his van. But he didn’t want to sully the screwdriver by actually letting it touch the dog poo, oh no! So he laid a wipe over the poo and then used the screwdriver through the wipe to remove the poo from the deep grooves in the sole of his boot, which might have worked if the wipes had been any good. But they weren’t, as previously mentioned. So he ended up with poo on the screwdriver and also on his hand where the rubbish wipe got scraped along by the screwdriver and stuck to his hand. He eventually used the screwdriver direct (having presumably decided that it was already covered in poo) and then settled for wiping his hands, the screwdriver and his shoe with a final wipe. Then he looked down and realised he’d just dropped all his used wipes on the floor and would need to pick them up. So he performed a rather impressive manouvere with one final wipe gathering all the poo covered ones up and bundling them into a black sack in his van. I couldn’t hear his muttering but I could see his lips moving and imagine what he might be saying.

For some reason he then decided to move his van off the verge. Except he couldn’t. Lots of rain recently has made the ground very soft and his wheels were stuck. He did lots of high revving and wheel spinning, churning up the grass and creating a big trench around his wheel. The gardener working in an opposite neighbours house stopped work to lean on his spade and watch the episode unfolding. If he could have seen me, tucked behind my window out of sight, he’d have caught my eye and smiled. BT van got out of his van, slamming the door behind him, opened the side door and got out a green mat he’d been using to kneel on. He tucked it as far under the stuck wheel as it would go and tried to reverse out again creating more noise and a lot more mud. And only actually succeeding in digging his wheel deeper into the mud. Oh and trashing his mat. He could probably have gone forwards actually but he’d positioned his van in such a way that he was very close to the streetlamp at the front and a telegraph pole at the back so he was restricted to reversing out at the exact same angle as he’d driven in.

He got again, slammed the door again and chucked his ripped mat back in the van. Then he got out a shovel. He made eye contact with the gardener across the road, who looked flustered and started gardening again. Then he dug a big hole around his wheel. By this point I’d called Ady to come and watch too, mostly because even I could tell that digging a bigger hole around a hole that was already stopping him from getting his wheel out was an unlikely solution to his problem. Ady watched to see if this would work, of course it didn’t, before going to get dressed and see if he could offer any assistance.

While Ady was off getting dressed the BT man decided that getting his van out was clearly beyond him so he got a phone out and looked like he was making a phonecall for assistance. Ady reappeared, dressed, and went out to talk to him. And came back to get his mobile phone as BT man’s phone battery was dead. He said he couldn’t accept any other help from Ady such as pushing him out, giving him a tow or even supplying a plank of wood to drive out along as it contravened Health & Safety and if Ady or his belongings were injured or damaged as a result of help he’d accepted then Ady might sue him. So Ady came back indoors again.

BT man then did whatever work it was he had to do in the BT hole. A bigger BT truck came along, blocked the road off, attached a rope to the truck and the van and effortlessly pulled him out. He stood around a while chatting with original BT man and smoking before heading off on his way with a cheery wave and a toot of his horn, presumably to continue his good work saving stranded BT men in distress all around the south coast. He towed BT man’s van out of sight (unless I went and looked from another window in the house which I couldn’t be bothered to do – assuming the saga was over). He reappeared, collected up his tools and his red and white stripey blocking off hole fencing and went out of sight again. I thought that was the end to the episode but he was to leave us with one final laugh.

As he pulled out of our road and drove away we noticed that he had left the sliding side door of his van wide open. Teetering on the edge of the van, ready to fall out at any moment were an assortment of tools, his ripped and very muddy green mat and the unsecured bag crammed with all of the dog poo smeared wipes. Wonder how far along the road he got before the whole lot fell out and he had to get out and pick them all up, starting the whole getting his hands cleaned up saga all over again….