This image is from the photoblog of a fellow called Alan who kicked the bucket in 2008. Apparently he used to wander about Sydney photographing urban curios, which is a lovely way to spend one's twilight (or any other, for that matter) years. I don't know how I ended up at his posthumously-maintained website, but this building was a blast from the past.

The photo is a stitched (and distorted) panorama of a block of flats in Annandale, in the inner west of Sydney. When I knew it, the building was a "self storage" facility to whom my then-employer — a huge multinational corporation which I cannot name, rhyming with "Baltex Oil" — outsourced its old records archiving. We basically occupied two football-pitch-sized floors of the building which was, as Alan or the curators of his legacy note, originally a piano factory.

Access to our floors was via a wire cage manual elevator. As you'll see in old films from early last century, the controls in these things were limited to a lever which took the car up or down, and much satisfaction was to be had in succeding in drawing the floor of the car to within a centimeter or two of your destination floor.

My employer had a room there dedicated to old furniture judged too ostentatious for the 1990s. I suppose they thought efficiency and frugality was a passing fad, and these items would be needed again in the future. There were desks and cabinets that for all I know were rosewood or mahogany, and I kid you not an honest-to-goodness grand piano. Colleagues of a sufficiently advanced vintage told me that it originally graced the staff cafeteria.

Another little room held tubes of blueprints and a cabinet of index cards of retail outlets held by an Australian company which was in the 1970's (I think) subsumed into the multinational. My grandfather was one of the franchisees of that company, in the 1950s I think, after returning from Korea (where he was apparently the company barber, occasionally coming under heavy dandruff). I forget now, but I knew then, which suburb his particular outlet was in. I held the little photographic slide accompanying that index card up to the light, but there was no sign of him.

The really outstanding thing was the factory washbasin. It was a circular bath, about six feet in diameter, with a fountain maybe four foot high in the middle. Around and beneath the curved basin there was a rail you would press down on with your foot (think of the rail upon which you rest your foot at a pub bar), turning on the water which would sprinkle out in all directions around the perimeter of the bath. I wish I could find a video of this setup; I've seen it documented (I think in a music video — Trashcan Sinatras maybe?) but I've had no success in formulating the right search engine query. It's basically Taylorist hygeine; terrible for washing one pair of hands, but it gets one shift washed and out as efficiently as possible, and the next lot in. I just can't work out, in this elegant piece of engineering, where they kept the soap.

Then there was the proximity to the Annandale Hotel. Superbly ordinary decor and brilliantly indifferent staff (at the time; I'm sure it's since been gentrified), and I saw a killer gig there by Bughouse, a fantastic band who were unfortunate enough to be too late to be post-punk, and too early to be post-punk revival.

Also I'm reasonably certain that at this distance I can say, without fear of legal reprisal, that I may have on occasion left the office with two Cabcharge dockets, and not redeemed the second at the end of an afternoon's hard work swinging boxes of paper about, playing with the lift, indulging in a creepy fascination with decades-old corporate ephemera, et cetera. A spare Cabcharge docket is a useful thing if you have a lifestyle which may involve missing the last train home, or falling down a flight of stairs and being unable to limp to the train station.

So if you have a unit at 45 Trafalgar Street, would you consider taking in a lodger? I am at the moment bereft of funds, but I am a living link to the property's rich history. If the original elevator's still intact, I'm more than happy to work it. I got my margin of error down to millimetres. Millimetres! You can't buy that kind of expertise, but you can aquire it in exchange for a mad old hobo sleeping on your floor.