Stored Manwich
Had a bunch of stuff in a storage place while the missus and I moved. Our accumulated furniture filled a storage unit - and I do mean filled. There's was perhaps three feet deep of empty space at the top of the unit, but the rest was jammed tighter than a lift at Weightwatchers HQ.

One Sunday I let myself into the now-deserted storage warehouse and took the lift up to the unit, accompanied only by the tinny sounds of Capital FM. I can't recall what it was I had to get, only that it was, inevitably, right at the back of the unit in the Important Stuff box.

The empty corridor stretched away on either side as I swung the doors back and started to ascend the dark mass of my personal junk mountain. As I reached the top of the initial junk-face, I triggered the automatic unit lights, blindingly bright and just a foot from my face.

Reeling slightly from this retinal cacophany, I inched my way forward and down through the pile toward the back of the unit and started. Squeezing my slender frame between the back of an MDF wardrobe and a vertical mattress, what had appeared, to my blinky eyes, to be the floor turned out to be a dark space, full of nothing.

I slipped down a little and the mattress came with me, wedging me tightly up against the back of the wardrobe. Shit. After a couple of minutes' desperate wriggling, my situation was improved immeasurably when, no longer sensing my body heat, the automatic lights went off.

I breathed hard in the pitch darkness, now seriously concerned that I was going to die alone, in the dark, pressed tightly between ratty furniture, and gently drowning to muffled strains of Capital FM's aural diarrhoea.

It was the threat of having to listen to hours of what is surely the nation's worst radio station that did it. Kicking and squirming like the world's greatest treacle diver, I struck out, grabbed a handful of brittle Argos bookshelf and hauled myself back up into the blessed, 100W heaven of the flourescent striplights atop crap mountain.

The adrenaline shakes stopped by the time I got the bus home. The embarrassment lasted longer. The busted shelf still mocks me every time I go to get a book.

Length? I was probably in there for all of seven minutes.
(SimianKid internet faffer, Fri 28 Feb 2014, 14:05, Reply)