While attempting to be an actor I held down various temp jobs. The one I held the longest, and officially saw me move from acting to full time-work, was at St Thomas' Hospital in London. It started out as three hours a day as a filing clerk attached to three medical secretaries (though not in the biblical sense). The job appeared straightforward "track down and deliver patient notes from around the hospital" but was often harder than it sounds even with a rather clunky file-location-database-thingy. The secretaries were part of the Paediatrics Department and had their offices up on the eighth floor of what was then the tallest building at the hospital. Two childrens' wards were also on this floor but a third had been left empty and housed the secretaries and myself.
My office had originally been a bedroom on the ward and would have housed three or four beds. Instead it now had two tables, a chair, a filing cabinet and a shopping trolley. This isn't one of those unexplainable trolley occurrences where they appear in canals, ponds and gardens across the planet. Instead this was an essential piece of equipment, used by the clerk to transport medical files. I'd hope that by now the advances in computer science means the files have been slimed down. But at the time an unfortunate patient could have as many as three thick files full of notes, charts and results. To carry them by hand up from the filing room in the hospital's cellar was asking for a slipped-disc and a new paper carpet if dropped - hence the trolley.
Another, equally obscure pieces of equipment was a broom! These were used exclusively by member of the filing room to retrieve files and notes which had fallen off shelves and were strewn all over the floor (I joke not). They did finally bring in some better shelving, the kind you see if spy movies, with the big wheels on the end that can be rolled along to save on space. However, this called for the final piece of clerk-kit - a good pair of boots. There you'd be in the shelving, searching for the lost secret of the January blood test, when suddenly some bright spark who hadn't checked first, would start rolling up your shelf! After the initial thrill of re-enacting the trash-compactor scene from Star Wars had passed you'd quickly move onto screaming your head off for them to stop. ("Listen to him, he's dying R2! Curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough!") But if all else failed your sturdy monkey-boot planted firmly between the stacks would avert a crushing death and allow you to clerk another day...
But the best part of the job was the view from my 'office'. For those unaware St Thomas' sits on the river Thames at Westminster opposite the Houses of Parliament. My room looked directly over the river and straight at the face of Big Ben. Never again will my place of work ever command such a view. Who needs a watch when one of the most famous time-pieces in the world is chiming exclusively for you. And if bored I could watch the boats on the river, the people crossing the bridge or smell the bullshit coming from Parliament. One of my favourite memories is that in the winter months, when it would be dark at the end of the day, you could watch the clock light up in dartboard like segments until the whole face would be shining before you, waiting for Peter Pan's party of four to arrive.
As said my temporary role eventually became permanent and eventually meant moving to a different, windowless office on the ground floor. Thankfully I'd still deal with the secretaries and got to visit their floor from time to time. But after about five years I finally made the break, moving on from the hospital and left London life altogether. One of the last things I saw from that aerie on the 8th was the construction and eventual raising of the London Eye. A decade later and I hopped into a pod on the Eye for the very first time during a visit to the big smoke. At the zenith of our flight I turned and waved to my old office and any clerk who might be watching...
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