'Someone must have told lies about Josef K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.' So begins Franz Kafka's extraordinary novel, The Trial. The ordeal of Joseph K. has become embedded in western consciousness and has spawned an adjective: 'Kafkaesque'.
Things are Kafkaesque when you are caught in a labyrinth of unmanageable and inexplicable circumstances. Short of great personal catastrophe, this kind of experience occurs for most of us when we encounter some echelon of bureaucracy. It is then that we feel close to Josef K. and can re-live his desperation.
Well, someone must have it in for Brian M. for without having done anything wrong he was comprehensively buggered up one fine morning. As with Josef K., it was a complicated business, but let's start with the storm water pipes.
Months of storm waterless drought had concealed the fact that they had splintered. This should not have happened. I inherited this pipe system and was unaware that what lay beneath the surface was what Shane the plumber called 'cheapskate 90 ml shit' instead of the sturdy 100 ml.
When heavy rain finally fell, water bubbled up from the collapsed storm water plumbing forming a lake at the back door and beyond. Foreseeing that I would have neither the time nor the equipment — like a casual jack hammer, for instance — to deal with another 50 metres of disaster, I conceded and called Shane.
A mere five days after he incredulously inspected the site, two of his workers, Jake and Dave, turned up to start their investigations. It rained, however — the trenches filled with water and they had to delay for another couple of days.
When, after three days, there was still too much water around to locate the damage, they went back to base to get a sludge pump. This took only a day and a half ...
Meanwhile, I had my own sludge to contend with, and no pump. At about the time I first approached Shane with my water problems, I had initiated an uncharacteristically intense series of encounters with the bureaucracy. These involved the renewal of my venerable and expiring Victorian Driving Licence with a South Australian equivalent, a request for a copy of my birth certificate, and a complicated application to a government agency.
These communications were accompanied by a battery of documentary proofs — photo ID, paid-up bills, bank statements, my