If there’s one thing I’ll learn from doing Edinburgh this year it’s that I am shit at admin. Lot’s of people from venues and the fringe office send me forms and emails to reply to and requests for things to send off, and I always remember the day after the absolute final deadline.
I’m worrying less and less about the show itself and now more about whether I’m going to barge through enough red tape to actually get the damned thing on.
Today was an important deadline for me to miss, it was the final final deadline to get my show info into the Official Fringe Programme thing.
I went to the internet place round the corner to print it out the forms as I have no printer. Then I went to use their fax machine, but it had broken. This was ok, I live in Islington, in my fevered imagination even Marks & Spencer must offer a fax service.
I was slightly worried only because today is a Saturday, and the deadline was yesterday, a Friday. Deadlines tend to notice these things. I’d reassured my panicked mind that if I got it faxed off by 12 noon then it would still count.
It was now 12 noon.
Me and the ever patient emm rushed around Angel, going into every newsagents, many had photocopying facilities, and also sold cigarettes and milk. But none had fax machines. No shops had fax machines, I didn’t know what to do. I also knew that if I had some kind of special faxray vision I’d be able to see all the glowing fax machines in all the offices and poncy Islington homes around me. But I didn’t and so just imagined what this would be like.
I found an internet cafe, he did faxes. He charged me three pounds a page. THREE FUCKING POUNDS? I had no choice, I prepared to hand over six qui for the two very important pages. But it wouldn’t send. I scurried off.
Eventually after trekking to Farringdon I found a shop on the Exmouth Market that had a fax service, the man said it was two pounds a page, better, but still…come on…
He handed it to his daughter to fax, a girl of seemingly about seven with world weary Victorian mill worker eyes she deftly entered the numbers into the archaic fax machine. I thought at least in the modern age young girls working in places don’t tend to get their hands ripped off by a fax machine, so not all is bad.
After what seemed to be a month the two pages were sent, and I relaxed a bit. But not a lot.