Our showers are push button and run for thirty seconds and stop, because a shower left running is a bill. Shower six runs for four minutes at about one in the morning, which is eight pushes, and the water meter agrees, and the building is locked, and in the morning the drain has hair in it that is not the colour of anybody who works here.
I am the facilities lead at a leisure centre and I read the water meter.
How the showers work.
Push button. Thirty seconds and it stops, push again for thirty more. The changing village has twelve of them and each one is on its own sub meter, because the day somebody's shower cubicle floods, I want to know which.
Shower six runs at one in the morning.
Four minutes, give or take, which on a thirty second button is eight pushes at the right moments. The sub meter shows the water, about forty litres, at the hot temperature. The building is locked and the alarm is set and the alarm has never gone.
What has been checked.
The button. Replaced. The valve. Replaced. The shower head. Replaced, and the old one is in my office and I have looked at it, and it is a shower head.
The cubicle. There is no camera in the changing village, for the obvious reason, but there is one on the corridor that sees the doorway, and nobody goes through the doorway between close and open.
The drain. Every morning the drain in six has hair in it. Long, dark, straight, which is not the hair of anybody on the staff and not the hair of the last person to use six the previous evening, whom I have started noting, and who has, on the three days I noted her, been blonde, grey, and shaved.
What I did.
I went in one night. I sat in the changing village at half past twelve with the lights on and waited.
At one o'clock, six came on. I was looking at it from about fifteen feet. The button pushed in. I saw it go in, the small movement, and the water came on, hot, I could see the steam. Thirty seconds. Stopped. The button pushed in. Water. Steam. Eight times.
The water fell straight to the tray. There was nobody in it for the water to fall on. But the tray, when the water ran in it, the water ran the way water runs round feet, in two channels, round two places where it could not go, and when it stopped the last of the water drained from round those two places last.
I did not go closer. I am not paid enough to be closer, and I do not think it would have minded.
The hair.
I asked the cleaner who has been here longest whether anybody had ever been hurt in the changing village. She said no. She said a woman had died in the pool in the eighties, before the refit, and that the changing village was built over where the old female changing had been, and that the old showers were on the same wall.
I asked what she looked like. The cleaner said she did not know, she had not been here, but that the woman who was here then had told her once that the woman who died had hair down to her waist and it had been in the filter for a week.
What is done about it.
The sub meter on six reads forty litres a night and the finance office has it as a leak and I have not corrected them.
What I do.
I look after the building.
I have put a shampoo in six. A bottle, on the shelf, the kind we sell at reception, because whoever is using it is using it every night and the thing you do for somebody who uses your shower every night is you put a shampoo in.
It goes down. About a fifth of a bottle a week, which is right for four minutes a night with long hair.
The cleaner found that funny, and then she did not, and then she asked me what happens if it runs out, and I said I would buy another, and she said, no, she meant what happens if it runs out, and I have made sure it does not.