Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

 

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What are the phrases that strike terror into your heart? The test's positive? Press One for a recorded message, press Two to be put on hold till 2020, press Three for someone who hates you ? For me the phrase that creates both despair and fury is We've called the engineers.

Of course some are excellent, of course some are lovely, but we need them so badly that whether we get good ones or the other kind seems to be pure chance.

Engineers currently have the power of a nineteenth century hangman. Their work can be quick and merciful, or long-drawn-out and agonising. If they don't turn up your life may not be worth living anyway, but if they do turn up they will always, mystically, need a part. Have you ever heard of an engineer having the part he needs? No, neither have I. Yet, somewhere in the world, there is some fabled, distant repository where these parts are hidden, waiting, wrapped in the sort of leaves that are rubbed on the thighs of nubile maidens before being turned into cigars. Antarctica , Shangri La, wherever this place is, only the engineers themselves know its location, and they aren't letting on.

Let's just consider a few examples. And remember, I live in the very centre of the West End of London. I do not live at the end of a six-mile rutted track, on a croft with no sewers or connection to a water or electricity supply. If engineers can't solve problems for me and those around me, what chance has anybody else got? But they can't, and they don't.

A week before last Christmas I tried to go into my bank. It's the huge international HSBC, and my nearest branch is in Oxford Street . It's so high tech it's got lights set in its immaculate flooring, and so many shining machines it looks like a Las Vegas slot palace. The staff stand about wearing neat uniforms and nice smiles, and I could see them as usual, that Monday, but I couldn't get in. And they were gesturing at me. There were notices all over the glass automatic doors, informing the public that those doors were out of order, and sending everyone around the back, in the direction the staff were waving.

Now, we're talking about freezing weather and an unlovely turning leading all the way around a large block to a little door, like the entrance to a rabbit hole. Here, whimpering, (I don't walk very well or very easily) I met a hypothermic girl, stamping her feet and beckoning when she wasn't thumping her hands together to restore her circulation. I hadn't bargained on this, but I had no choice. And inside the problems weren't over within a pace I was met with a lethal step that plunged me, stumbling, down to a lower floor level. In these days, when disabled access is high on the agenda for all designers, this renovated, modernised branch of a vast concern, complete with every convenience at the front, was now effectively closed to anyone in a wheelchair.

When I could speak, I asked someone what was being done. The engineers were coming, I was told, and the doors would be working again any minute. After all, those automatic doors were the only Oxford Street entrance.

Just over a week later, on the 29th December, awash with goodwill and trusting Christmas spirit, I returned to the branch. But the notices were still all over the glass doors, the staff had grown tired of waving, and the turning to the back of the building was grimly gritty. No-one stood at the unappealing little back door, (perhaps the greeter had been carried off, a uniformed ice lolly) and when I got my breath back and asked about the engineers I was told they were coming. Still.

On the 4th January, I completely lost it. The country had yet to be paralysed by the weather, but this branch of an international bank, in the capital's main shopping street a street thronged with tourists who wanted to change dollars or Euros for pounds and a population who wanted to pay in or take out money was stillcompletely inaccessible for wheelchair-bound people and still had paralysed doors after two weeks.

I threw a mild tantrum in the bank, which got me nowhere, and then, resting at home, managed to contact HSBC's customer service team. This resulted in a very polite telephone call from a young woman at the branch, who told me that the Manager had been ringing the engineers every day since the problem started. Has he tried calling another firm? I asked grimly. And discovered that the poor man couldn't: every branch was tied to a contract with the same engineers, who must have been chortling all the way to another bank one they could get into.

But I assure you it will be dealt with, said the polite young woman. They have promised to attend.

Came the following Monday, in the depths of the Great Freeze. I trudged around the block through a gritty, slithery mush of ice, after a week when half my radiators at home hadn't been working (engineering work was being done in our boiler house ) and had a minor skirmish when I finally reached the banking hall. WHY AREN'T THE DOORS WORKING? I asked a girl who'd obviously got used to this pointless question. The engineers came, she mourned, but they said they hadn't got the right part.

The part they did have, of course, was a contract. And if they keep it that bank must have more money than sense (which seems to have been the problem with a whole lot of financial institutions in recent times).

Another furious blast from me to the bank's customer service team, another polite telephone call a while later, telling me that, at last, the doors had been repaired. But they'd been out of order for over three weeks and what weeks! At the height of the pre-Christmas shopping mania and the post-Christmas Sales mayhem that branch had had no Oxford Street or disabled access. Like the rest of us, it had been powerless the power isn't with bankers or politicians after all, it's with engineers.

And, within a few months, they were in charge again. In April the automatic doors were motionless once more, refusing entry to all comers, and plastered with the same maddening notices that had decorated them in December. After two weeks of struggling to the gruesome back door and risking breaking my neck on the murderous step inside it, I clawed my way to the customer service team and threw a fit. There were yet more conversations, but this time a new manager not only got the problem fixed, but also took note of my suggestion that if customers could not use the front doors a ramp should be provided at the back entrance. A minor victory, of sorts, but if the engineers have their way, by the end of the year that ramp'll be worn down to a wedge.

And if the problem isn't access via doors, it's access via lifts. And here I have somewhere to nominate that's so impenetrable it's in a class all its own. I rely on Marks & Spencer's Food Hall, which is very near to me and where I am given an enormous amount of physical help. Marks & Spencer's staff must be the kindest in the world, but that branch (the Pantheon) has just one small lift. The whole place went through an enormous and radical refit a few years ago, but the lift remained unchanged except in one respect. It used to work, and now it doesn't.

For years what happened was predictable. You rang for the lift in the basement Food Hall, (where there are also the café and toilets) and it might come down to you, but, nine times out of ten, the doors wouldn't open at that level, and after you'd stared at the indicator for a while it would go away again. The wheelchair-bound, mums with babies in buggies, people like me who might be accompanied, but leaning on crutches or trolleys, and even the staff themselves, with quantities of goods to be taken to other floors we stared as the lift ran off (when it was actually moving and not immobilised higher up). And the engineers came, and did something, and it worked for a day or two at best, and then the same thing happened all over again. I have seen a member of the staff hauling on the doors and nearly crying the people who work there face this nightmare far more often than the customers, because they're in the store all day, but the problem was never permanently solved.

Sometimes an Out of Order sign was stuck on it. This could last for days, and sometimes weeks. Or the floor indictor was blank, and the lift call button was dead. Yes, everyone agreed, it was out of order again. But usually it simply didn't open at the basement, and there was no sign on it because everybody knew this was how it behaved badly, like a drunken relative at a wedding and a kind member of staff would help people like me up an escalator. I believe someone in a wheelchair might be put in a goods lift provided that was working, of course. And this isn't some little sandwich outlet, it's a really big, prestigious branch, ( Oxford Street again), which celebrated its centenary last year.

And then came the great leap forward. The store had a new Manager, and after yet another succession of liftless days I rang her. Yes, she was agonised by the situation the children's department is on the first floor and mothers with babies in buggies couldn't get to it! She was losing custom! With such restraint that my fingernails left marks on the telephone receiver, I pointed out that, without a functioning lift, only the ground floor was accessible to wheelchairs, and that three floors of the store were effectively closed to disabled people.

What amazes me is that this should go on when we've had a Disability Discrimination Act since 2005, and the management at Marks & Spencer must know perfectly well that having only one little lift which is constantly out of order flies in the face of all that is required not just as a courtesy but by legislation.

The manager was immediately very sympathetic and said that the dreadful problem had to be solved. But it wasn't. For whatever reason, it actually got worse. A script ran up the indictor in place of the floor numbers, and it read Out of Order more often than not. The lift didn't work for several days every week, and calls about the problem weren't returned. As a final blow an Out of Order sign was put up for three solid weeks, and just one day after its removal the lift was resting again.

But that was the nadir. In recent months it's actually been working more often than not, although it still has a habit of making fleeting visits to the basement only to flee upwards again without opening its doors. I report it, as do others, and it either pulls itself together before anybody important finds out what's happening, or the engineers turn out and say there's nothing wrong with it. I don't think the idiosyncrasy will ever be completely eradicated.

But lifts seem beyond the ken of engineers in businesses all over the West End . I stopped going to the Regent Street branch of my bank years ago, because the lift had a pot plant permanently stuck in front of it, and nearly all business had to be conducted up flights of stairs.

Boots the Chemist in Carnaby Street has adorable, helpful staff, but its lift is another with only an intermittent work ethic. And since its dispensary is on the first floor, people who can't climb steps are in trouble. Someone will rush to help, and take you up and down in the goods lift, but again the problem never seems to be finally solved.

Everywhere, the staff are the ones who have to apologise to customers and (in the stores) look after them, while the management don't take a strong enough line with engineers who appear to suffer no penalties or retribution.

But at least these failures are happening in the outside world. It's when they affect you in your own home that you start chewing a bit of blanket and ringing Samaritans. In my time I have sweltered throughout a heatwave with roasting central heating 'ow did you get this radiator like that? demanded an aggressive engineer. I hadn't done anything to it, but I had to admit, cowering, that I couldn't turn it off. Neither could he. Neither could anyone else, for a long time. It needed a control knob that worked, and it took a year to get one.

But being too hot, in England , is usually merely uncomfortable. Being too cold is horrendous. When I got the new control it was thermostatic, but fitted in a position which created a false reading, so it turned the radiator off the minute it came on.

That problem was finally dealt with, but the past year has been like Tolstoy's War and Peace, without the peace. And I learned that the trouble wasn't just the engineers, it was the people who ordered the work to be done by them. The heating couldn't be turned on when it was needed in the autumn because simple repairs scheduled for the summer hadn't been completed the schedulers' fault, not the engineers'. We plugged electric heaters in beside our cold radiators, and it would have been cheaper just burning money. Along with this, for months, from early summer until just before Christmas, we had tepid and often stone cold water, not hot, while a man with a monitor and a graph watched this phenomenon from a distance, fascinated, and everything that we were told would restore such a dangerously modern convenience as constant hot water failed to do so. We had no overnight heating during the Great Freeze, while my heating didn't work properly even during the day, because a boiler was being replaced (something no engineering firm would recommend undertaking in the depths of winter). One of our lifts went out and stayed out, (it's a fifteen storey block) while a mystic part was obtained but didn't work when it arrived, and the control panel fuses kept blowing. Then we had hot water at last, but we also had boiling water coming out of our bathroom cold taps and lavatory cisterns we had more engineers than residents, and it isn't over yet.

But it probably never will be. What's happened is a seismic shift in work of this kind as I used to know it. Nothing is ever finished you continue to live with it, like the endless, ubiquitous roadworks that are making an impassable Hell of my beloved West End .

In the twentyfirst century, when we ought to know so much more and be so much more efficient, are we actually creating heating and hot water systems, and radiator controls, (and even lifts) so complex that they need a resident engineer to keep them in order? It seems so either that or the people who draw up schedules, place orders and choose contractors take no account of the effect their decisions will have on the people who are obliged to live with them, or (far more importantly) keep a check on what's happening day to day. After all, that's exactly the attitude responsible for central London 's barriers and trenches where it used to have streets.

Confronted with one more cold radiator when it's freezing, one more lift that avoids me, and one more man with more monitors and graphs than sense, I'll take a good nineteenth century hangman. That kind of quick, merciful work would be so much more fun.

© Alida Baxter

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