It’s the first meeting of the year today for our writing group, Fellowship of Australian Writers (local branch). We meet at a local council building next to a car park. In the car park on Saturday mornings there is a farmer’s market, and I enjoy getting here early enough to browse the fresh produce.
Farmers Market produce is special.
I’m about ten minutes early but already a group is waiting outside the closed doors of the hall. I stop off at a stall and buy a couple of Portuguese tarts, then head back to the hall. The crowd is larger now, but still milling around.
The door is locked. But it’s not simply a case of who forgot to pick up the key. No, the new security system seems to be the problem. We have the pass code, we have the key, but the door remains stubbornly locked.
Various stallholders pass by on their way to the outdoor toilet. At the sight of our crowd milling around, a few express concern that the toilet is very much in demand.
“No, you’re the only one in the queue,” we reassure them.
My impromptu work station, outside the locked hall. Meanwhile the farmers’ market is almost finished packing up.
Time passes. Various committee members have tried the key pad, carefully checking the numbers against the booking sheet that had been emailed to us and printed. Others try the key. Maybe it’s key pad AND key?
The secretary is on the phone to the council. “We’ve got nobody booked into the hall for today,” she’s told.
“WE’RE booked in, I have the confirmatory email in my hand, we paid and booked last year, in advance.”
Someone sees a discarded paving tile in the nearby garden bed and jokes, “We could throw that through the window.”
“If we throw that through the window, the alarms will go off and security will come.”
“Good!” says the first speaker. “Then they can let us in.”
A stallholder emerges from the toilet in time to hear the conversation. “Don’t use the paver,” he says. “It’s too heavy. At my stall I have kilo packs of frozen lamb. That’d do it.”
Meanwhile the rest of us now number about twenty. We have some new people today, after our book launch a few weeks ago.
The guest speaker arrives. “Oh, dear! Has someone forgotten the key?”
The secretary announces, “They’re sending a man over to let us in, the key pad seems to be malfunctioning. They’re advising us to go around the back to the courtyard there. The man will meet us there to let us in.”
I stay put. There are a few more people possibly arriving late, and at least here, there is a brick wall for me to sit on.
I get out my laptop and start typing. I may as well put the solitary wait to good use. I contemplate the frozen lamb suggestion and wonder how we could explain this. “Well, the market was on, I was walking past with these frozen lamb shanks and they just slipped. Through the window… from the stall on the other side of the car park…”
Nope.
One of our members has gone round to the council library to see if we can use one of their rooms. She comes back, shaking her head. “We need to book online, I was told, and pay in advance.”
“A bit hard to book online and pay in advance when it’s already an hour after we were supposed to start,” I remark.
She shrugged. “Where is everybody?”
“Waiting around the back for the security person to come let them in the back door.”
It’s after 1.30 pm, an hour after the meeting is supposed to have started. The farmers market has left the car park by the time a man in hi-vis vest arrives. He comes past the loo, clearly heading for the problem door. Not the back door where everyone is waiting.
It takes very little time from here. We still don’t know why the door wouldn’t work for us, maybe you just need to hold your tongue in the right position. He walks our key-holder through the process, to practice how we should leave the place. “Don’t lock the door as well as use the key pad. That’s why you couldn’t get in, the door was locked with both. This thing has been giving us trouble all week.”
He demonstrates. The door doesn’t lock. “Hmmm…” At the end of the whole process, we’re going to have to lock the door with the key AND the key pad. The same process we were told initially to not do, and which is causing ongoing problems.
Gotta love bureaucracy…
The pre-meeting meeting while waiting to be let in.
Book launch was a couple of weeks ago. We’re a prolific group!
I got to the back courtyard where the others were waiting to be let in. They’d found some chairs and had started the meeting without me. It seemed a shame to ask them to move.
As I always tell my fellow writers, we have to always be adapable and ready to respond to the absurd when it throws story lines our way.
Helen Armstrong - writing on the move 