Like an indifferent explorer in a bleached jungle, Warren set off to finish his errand. Weed set off on his own. Dismayed at his interview with Stonewall and fantasising about waking the next morning to find that he had metamorphosed overnight into a competent worker and red-hot salesperson, he failed to keep in sight the black and yellow doobry that marked his pit stop.

Confronted with a monolithic metal case he simply changed tack. Up against another he changed direction again. This happened a few times before his nagging bladder persuaded him to take a bearing.

He realised he had wandered into a broad, empty boulevard lined with the huge filing cabinets. Backtracking, he learned that there were dozens of alleys leading off left and right, all apparently identical and offering no clue to the route he took here. He had no sense of in which direction to find the office, nor could he even hear it. The cabinets were about four meters tall and were proving to be excellent soundproofing — if you happen live next to a motorway or an airport or a war zone or an ice cream van and happen to be thinking of insulating your home against noise, you might be able to pick some up cheap from Daikon AirCon because they’ve got lots.

After experimenting inconclusively with a few of the side streets he decided he was in an unusual predicament. He was hopelessly lost in a maze of monstrously large filing cabinets.

Well, he thought, a filing system must have a beginning and an end, and began reading the labels on the drawers intending to navigate out by following the numbers to the end of their sequence. Starting at 509600 - 936999 he worked back toward 000001 until the labels discontinued at 247000. They reassuringly resumed at A. Just six paces later with no toilet or office in sight they terminated at Z but restarted at a. After d, that series went abruptly to aa, got tired at ll, and set off again at a disconcertingly imaginative 4LOC-TUG 633 0000 43-D, passed quickly through COW/2 - D/CUP, and when it got to INXPLCBL/HO HO HO Weed gave up.

In a further outburst of initiative that would have had Ms. Wap rifling through her training manual, he resolved to partially open alternate drawers on two columns of cabinets to improvise a sort of ladder by which he would climb to the top of the cabinet wall, get his bearings and navigate safely to the lav.