Clever Magazine,Spring 2007 " Drainspotting " (www.clevermag.com)

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Drainspotting

by Robert Hanshew

Robert Hanshew is currently a Museum Curator in Washington DC and works mainly taking care of, researching, writing and publishing histories on old military photographs from the dawn of photography to the present. He has previously lived in London, Dublin, and Warsaw, Poland. He is the proud father of two beautiful boys and is married to a beautiful woman who keeps him mentally and physically young.

Working as a Museum Curator in an old building can be very frustrating, especially when the building is leaking and falling apart. One can try to stop nature, but man is also part of the deterioration. Let me tell you of just one example. My co-workers and I have documented countless times our ceiling is leaking, all from an outside, clogged gutter. When the repair division investigates, usually days later, they state since the roof is not currently leaking – there isn’t anything they can do about it. We then reiterate the reason why the ceiling isn’t leaking is because it’s not raining outside. After cautious deliberating, they state when it rains again to give them a call, and they will be immediately over. Of course, when it rains and we call, nobody in the repair division picks up the phone.

One day, after a great torrential downpour, I came into the office to find about four ceiling tiles had fallen onto the floor, and the ceiling was leaking. The computer on the desk underneath was completely ruined. Worst of all, some twenty historical color prints were wet. Again, we called for repairs but nobody came over to fix the problem. Due to the lack of any kind of work ethic by the repair division, one of my co-workers designed and made a drain spout out of bubble-pop wrapping material and high-density mailing tape. The water funneled into a bucket and reserved the flow of incoming water. To our surprise, it worked rather well and received rather inspiring comments from outside researchers visiting our office.

Strangely enough, a repair division employee came into our office one day, unannounced and without us calling him. He looked around the area and asked us if we had any problems. Obviously, our previous trouble calls were not documented. We showed him our hand-made system. He looked at it with an introspective eye and rubbed his hand underneath his chin.

He said after a few strokes, “You know, it would cheaper to build a metal version of what you guys made rather than trying to fix the problem from the outside.”

I innocently asked, “You tell me, doing all that is cheaper than cleaning the gutters?”

He responded, “The paperwork involved with cleaning gutters is a nightmare. It’s so much cheaper to build an interior metal awning.”

After an hour discussing his project, he told us he would be back soon to finally solve this on-going problem. Our days of waiting now have turned into weeks. Our homemade system is still standing and working. The repair division has never returned to fix the gutters or to build the interior-metal awning. On the bright side, at least they fixed the water-fountain problem in our library, which used to shoot a foot more than usual – wetting the surprised drinker and the library’s books at the same time. For them to fix that problem, well, it only took a year.