Clearance

I’ve run a bath. It’s done. I’m filthy.

Planning.

I had a team of 8, myself included. I couldn’t sell a screenplay about the day I had as it was 7 men and 1 woman. I needed muscle.

The guy who charges our client to open this unit doesn’t show up until ten. The tip closes at 4 and it’s half an hour. We’ve got two local units for quick shuttle processing. One is large but has a tiny door, one is smaller but has double doors. I needed them both. The stuff in them is going to different places, but that’s as maybe. With no time there’s nothing you can do. All this stuff is in store but the guy drives up from London and charges the company £650 to open a shutter. It’s fucking ridiculous.

I have gone over budget on this massively, and I did it as I had the sense that there would be value in what I was taking. The costume will be the thing I never regret. But I am close to 100% certain that our mardy northerner went in there and emptied the flight cases. He’s cherry picked this stuff for himself. He’s a magpie. It worked to my advantage today to an extent, as he took all the Dolavs off my hands. I could have sold them easily enough for £1000 as a job lot or £120 each but I haven’t a place to turn them around and he does. I’d have taken them to Canterbury where I have space for them, but we had a van break down so his acquisitive nature (I just got back and he’d taken them inside) worked to my advantage as it saved me a van load. Really you need a forklift for them, and a warehouse, they are bulky to move and store. He grabbed all the pallets too without comment, and a huge pile of metal chairs with my blessing. He’s the one restricting the hours of access. He’s the reason I have to rush the job and just go hard to the dump. And he’s taken out the small stuff that has value to solve in his sweet time as he has access. I can’t sell IP stuff, and I’ve still got a van day plus two worth of problems to solve now. There’s an alien sarcophagus we couldn’t dump as it is IP. It’s in a storage unit and when there’s more time I’ll likely have to go in and break it up but that’ll be another two people employed plus tip weight. I’ll combine it with loads of other things we didn’t have time to process so put into the store.  It was absolute junk we took today and that’s fine as we were largely tip running anyway. But… it’s junk because Andy has organised the piles and skimmed. I’ve got all these empty flight cases in storage. I don’t think they were empty when we first arrived. Why would they be when they’ve just come off a show? Nice to have the cases, sure, might help balance things financially. But there’s fuckery here, my darlings.

I’m happy though. We stormed through it. There were all sorts of contingencies we didn’t expect, the tip took the piss and told us they had to process our beautifully separated wood as if it was general because they were “full of wood”. Ditto our metal “couldn’t be properly recycled as it’s not pure”, and the time pressure we were put under of £650 a day meant it was just better to pay tip weight than scrap it. Bastards at the tip. But I did the job the client needed and he need never know the fact I got fucked on tip weight, or my suspicions about Andy.

I know more about this game now. There was no gold in there for me but the costumes, but… there was silver – it’ll take work and I’ll have to be efficient if I’m gonna mine it, but I’ve got costs to recoup now. They’ll be worth it if I can pitch and win the next job there at a sensible price, so long as Andy hasn’t already skimmed off all the value off the next job. (Spoiler alert:he probably has.)