Long before I was legally old enough to work, I faked my way into a series of telesales jobs. This is my C.V of that time.

Summer, 1996. Posh double glazing.

Lasted twenty five minutes into the first shift. How many windows and doors would you replace in your home, does not a sales call make.

Autumn, 1996, More double glazing.

Slightly less posh. Get called a starfish everyday for a month in the classic team humiliation game, who is a star, who is a starfish? by a guy I once turned down in the local goth club. Learn the definition of karma, or his definition at least.

Meet my nemesis, crush him with my superior telesales skills.

Arrive one wintery evening to find the boss shredding paperwork and staff looting telephones and fax machines. Have to collect payment cheque midweek at noon, difficult because I’m only fourteen and have to bunk from school to do it.

Winter, 1996. Sex line.

Turn up to telesales job interview that insists over 18s only. Bring fake I.D. Learn it’s phone sex. Wonder why I didn’t work that out beforehand. Back away slowly.

Winter, 1996. Assorted.

Get a job in a three quarter empty Victorian office block. Long halls, red carpet, like The Shining. Just me and a man, maybe 45, in a room. He files papers and watches me make calls.

I sell milk subscriptions, charity donation box installations and private medical insurance, even though I don’t know what it is.

Terrified of the corridors, not at all bothered being alone locked in an office with a strange man. By now I am fifteen and therefore convinced I am impervious to all danger, apart from supernatural threats.

Spring, 1997. Home care systems.

Old man locks room one day and doesn’t come back. Suspect ghosts.

New job convincing people to allow a salesman into their home on the pretence of cleaning their carpets. Much like inviting in a Vampire, you’re screwed, at least until you agree to buy a fancy vacuum cleaner.

Company is American. Get a shaving foam pie in the face at least once a fortnight. Learn all the words to the sales chants of the door to door guys including, what are we? RHINO, what do we do, CHARGE.

Begin taking on more shifts and am soon working every evening and weekends. Tracy Chapman convinces me to save all my paycheques toward a Ford Capri.

Win a small bottle of Archers for most leads and mistakenly down it like an alcopop. Never touch the peachy stuff again.

Get promoted and run the team. Boss goes to America, leaves me in charge of the call centre. Have to fire someone twice my age, cry after shift.

Lose office keys, climb in through window, find keys in bag.

Height of summer. Take my GCSEs wearing normal clothes under my uniform. Run out of exams and take uniform off at bus stop. Barely make it to shift on time. Repeat for two weeks, hope no one from work spots me in school clothes. Try not to sweat.

Call in sick for the first time. Saturday morning. Confess first love has dumped me and I’m stranded, miles from the office. Sales guy drives up to collect me. Gives long speech about getting over first love. Feel cared for by failing salespeople in stained polyester shirts.

Autumn, 1999. Timeshare.

Move away to college. Back in the bullpen selling timeshare to people without passports. Have coughing fit in the interview, somehow still get job.

New boss arrives to shape up the staff.  He is sixty, orange and wears comedy ties. When I look at him I think about cardiac arrest.

Reunited with my old nemesis, crush him again with my superior telesales skills.

Get promoted to closer and moved to room full of regional staff taking inbound calls for Scottish Power. People ask what the strange noise is in the background.

Summoned once a week to receive bonus money in white envelope. Feel like pint sized Mafioso. Have disposable income for the first time. Buy wedding dress from Oxfam and go to raves in it. Believe I am cool and original.

Boss declares office fit and heads home. I am asked to present him with cake. Everyone cheers. Two weeks later the business folds. No more envelopes. Wedding dress smells of farm.

Spring, 2000. Back to double glazing.

Last telesales job. Barren estate miles from town. Bloody double glazing, but a record £5 an hour basic wage in two hour shifts per day.

Meet Nemesis again, this time the roles are reversed. I am in the gutter, a real starfish. His eccentricity just makes people confess they want to replace their windows. They can feel his fun Hawaiian shirt through the phone.

After two weeks without a single lead and an £80 pay cheque, I beat a noble retreat and resign to the bleach blonde 22 year old college dropout running the place. She tells me she’s impressed at my candidacy. Manage not to correct her.

The nemesis bids me farewell, his smug grin 40% gum, 60% braces. I leave with my telesales reputation in tatters. I see him again, by chance, fifteen years later on Oxford Street. He’s still in sales and Hawaiian shirts. I don’t tell him what I’m doing.

Summer, 2000. Get a real job.

Sorry to the countless people I called during dinner, to all the guys I promised to go on a date with after they had given me a lead and finally to Mr Turtle, for laughing hysterically at your name and having to hang up only to call back five minutes later and do the same thing.

]]> http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/08/17/86/feed/ http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/29/work/ http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/29/work/#comments Fri, 29 Jul 2011 21:44:42 +0000 admin Writing Personal http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/29/work/

Everyone has terrible stories about their first job. I had several friends who worked in the local lettuce factory, twelve hour shifts, standing up, halving icebergs – hallucinating beheading their enemies, or maybe their supervisors.

Others, who worked boxing carpet samples, or worse, boxing boxes. I knew one man, whose entire role consisted of weeding insects from an endless conveyor belt of raisins for a major cake producer. An exceedingly bad position.

My own introduction to work came in the form of a two weeks experience in an accounts department, locked inside a secure wing of the local mental hospital.

There were many problems to this post; the most prominent being my utter lack of mathematical nous that saw me banished to the back room with the important role of shredding confidential documents for eight hours a day.

Like a scene in a cheap sitcom, I opened the door to a windowless room, empty but for a shredder and paper stacked from floor to ceiling, waiting to meet its maker.

I spent my days sweating over the machine, door closed because the noise disturbed the accountants. I would emerge at intervals to heave the plastic bags of waste through the department and across the hospital grounds to the industrial bins behind what I thought was an incinerator, but found out much later, was in fact just the boiler house.

Big black plumes of smoke circled the Victorian buildings. I had visions of amputated limbs and secret still births in yellow biomedical waste bags piled outside, waiting to be burned. We had been studying Auschwitz at school and I saw death everywhere.

It wasn’t helped by the stories my Mother had told me about the mental hospital detaining unwed mothers in the twenties and thirties, then holding them for the duration of their lives. I pictured these women, once coherent, slowly driven out of their minds by their hopeless situation.

In another circumstance I would have been fearful of seeing the ghosts of these women wandering the sterile linoleum floors. There was no need to conjure up spirits; the walkways and my mind were occupied with patients.

As soon as I left the double locked security wing of the accounting department, I would begin to eye up anyone who passed me. The block I worked in was supposed to be staff only, but the patients still wandered in, some zombified and lost, others acutely alert.

People in shirts and ties would occasionally break into incoherent shouts, or flail their arms. The person opposite you in the cafeteria would aggressively flip their tray without warning, spraying milk and pudding all over their neighbours.

I should have realised that one, how many balanced adults select milk as their drink of choice?

I went home and told my Mother. How do you spot a mental patient? She shot at me, Easy, they look like just like you and me. With that piece of wisdom I looked for menopausal women and sullen teens.

Now, I am equipped with the social skills to converse with people sitting on various positions of the mental health scale, half a lifetime ago I was an introverted bag of hormones intimidated by a building that emitted dark smoke.

Lunchtimes were the worst: I’d wander round the expansive grounds, between boarded up Victorian villas and open grass fields. Sometimes I’d hunt for conkers, occasionally I would dare to listen to my walkman, but the staff warned me against this so I’d be able to hear anyone approach me.

During my first week, I got into the habit of breaking the monotony of shredding by sulking in the staff toilets, slumped in a cubicle, walkman blaring Sisters of Mercy.

One afternoon, I pulled my headphones off, slouched out the cubicle to find a woman, around forty, vigorously brushing her teeth.  She asked me if I brushed mine, a pretty normal question from an adult to a kid.

I curled by lip up like a rodent, exposing my double train track braces for her to examine. She mimicked me, revealing a very nice set of teeth coated in blood. I leaned toward her, saw the blood on the bristles of her brush and smeared on her lips and cheek.

That’s when I decided to leave.

Two more days of sweating and shredding, punctuated with occasional failed attempts to flirt with a female accountant, who looking back was a, an adult b, just being nice and c, clearly not gay, I learnt the art of calling in sick.

I like to think it wasn’t the crazy that got to me, it was the monotony. I could have stuck it out with a bathroom full of compulsive brushers if only I was allowed to alphabetise a file, or answer a telephone.

Looking back, it’s more likely I was a lazy teenager who thought she was too good for day long shredding.

To all the patients I remembered but misunderstood, I’m sorry. To all the accountants, who I remember nothing about, perhaps if you’d thrown milk all over me, you might have earned a place in my memory.

]]> http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/29/work/feed/ http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/25/four-stories-part-one/ http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/25/four-stories-part-one/#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:18:59 +0000 admin Writing Personal http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/25/four-stories-part-one/

Last year I spent a couple of weeks with ex-child soldiers from Uganda. These monologues are based on the snippets of conversation we shared, formal interviews and my own impressions.

I               Gloria

I met this Journalist today, this woman. She told me I was the strongest female she had ever met.

Me.

She has met a lot of important people. People in Government, people who make decisions.

She said that even though I was half her age, I had seen the world and lived through terror. I had made it out the other side.

I didn’t know what to say. There are sixty other children on the bus, and back home in Uganda, there are thousands of us, too many to count.

How can I be the strongest? I’m a fourteen year old girl.

We have been in England telling our stories to Journalists for two weeks. It is cold here; I always keep my coat on.

The other girls tease me for being so skinny. I can’t help it. I’m not good with food.

Sometimes it is so cold, I shake. The Journalists think it is fear. It’s not. I don’t know what fear looks like to me now.

Sometimes I cry. You tell the same story eight, nine times a day, but it’s still your story, it’s still your pain. This is what they want to know:

How old were you when you were taken?

Did you know what the rebels would do to you?

Did you have a choice?

Were you beaten?

Were you raped?

How many times?

How many men?

Did you cry out?

Did you try to get away?

I tell them all of it, all of it and more.

The Journalist kissed me goodbye.  She asked the same questions as the others, but she was the only one to cry when she heard my story.

I think maybe she was crying for her own pain, for her own personal terror.

Just before we said goodbye, she told me about this English Queen, long ago. The Queen said, I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too.

That’s you, the Journalist said. You are that Queen. 

I knew then, that she was right.

Some of us are trapped in fragile bodies and our blood will spill and our bones will be broken.

Our hearts will remain strong. My heart will remain strong.

]]> http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/25/four-stories-part-one/feed/ http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/25/four-stories-part-two/ http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/25/four-stories-part-two/#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:18:19 +0000 admin Writing Personal http://www.kimelliott.net/2011/07/25/four-stories-part-two/

Last year I spent a couple of weeks with ex-child soldiers from Uganda. These monologues are based on the snippets of conversation we shared, formal interviews and my own impressions.

II             Albert

The first thing I want to say to the people of Britain is that forgiveness is a two way street.

You have to let go of everything that has happened to you and to your family. You have to forgive those who harmed you.

Really forgive.

In return, you can let go of your own sin.

When you do you can almost see it drifting out of you, like smoke.

Now you are thinking what has this boy experienced that he needs to forgive?

What has he done that is so terrible?

The rebels stole my Father from me. They shot him, on his knees, in our kitchen.

When his body hit the floor I thought this life could not get any worse. Three months later, I was wearing their uniform, killing my neighbours.

They train you to be a soldier, a child soldier.

The training ends when you get a gun and a uniform. The only way to get these is to pick them from the dead bodies of government soldiers.

The rebels would give you two weeks to get your uniform, if you fail or refuse, they would say, forget it, we will kill you.

Many children refused to get a gun, or just couldn’t get a gun, and they were killed.

It was a very hard thing to do. Some of my closest friends were killed that way – they failed to get a gun.

I got my gun.

We entered an ambush on government soldiers and, just like when we trained, we would trail all the way around to the back of the facility and get behind the government soldiers.

Rebels who already had guns shot them. Their bodies crumpled. One dead soldier was close to me and I took his gun and his uniform and wore it. I was thirteen.

Much later, during another ambush I was shot in the leg by a government soldier. They held me captive, at gunpoint, pinned to the forest floor. There was no way I could run – I was scared they would kill me.

I was strong enough to tell them, I was abducted, please don’t shoot me, but those soldiers, they had friends the rebels had killed.

Somehow, they were kind enough not to shoot me. Forgiveness is a two way street.

They left me outside a hospital. I stayed at the hospital for a long, long time.

I didn’t know where to go.

I had been forced to be a rebel for so long that I didn’t know where I was from, I couldn’t remember my name.

Last year I spent a couple of weeks with ex-child soldiers from Uganda. These monologues are based on the snippets of conversation we shared, formal interviews and my own impressions.

III            Raymond

We have spent the whole day on the bus. Gloria is asking us all what it means to live with a strong heart trapped in a weak body.

I want to tell her she is lucky to have a weak body. She didn’t have to do the things I had to do.

I understand her – I do. I saw what happened to the girls, many of them were raped more often than they were fed.

Her body was not her own.

As a boy my body was strong. The rebels used that.

I shot people. I dragged the elderly out of their beds and beat them to death in the streets. The blood and dust would fill my nostrils.

I set people on fire.

We were trained to stay and watch to make sure they were dead. It takes a long time for someone to burn to death.

I could have refused and been killed myself. I didn’t refuse.

These strangers that want to hear our story, would they still shake my hand if they could see the things I’ve done?

When our camp was raided and we child soldiers were liberated, my grandmother found me and brought me back to our community.

It was hard to go home. At first, the village children would ask me if I was the one who killed their parents. I never answered, but sometimes I could have said yes.

They are young. After time, they will learn that we didn’t do it because we wanted to; we did it in order to stay alive.

Even though we were strong, our bodies were not our own.

We had to do it.

Last year I spent a couple of weeks with ex-child soldiers from Uganda. These monologues are based on the snippets of conversation we shared, formal interviews and my own impressions.

V             Joy

This is a strange country. Where I come from, everything is brown – the earth, the trees, our homes. Here, in England, everything is grey. Even the people are grey.

They never smile. You English all want to know why I am smiling. What have I got to smile about? Okay, I will tell you.

Sometime the rebels would get restless. We’d travel at night, miles upon miles, and the soles of our feet swollen and cut.

In the day, the rebels would secure an area and we’d follow after, dragging the supplies with us.

The rebels were often bored. They wanted to be entertained.

Back in my village, we would stand in a circle and watch each other dance. We would clap and shout out. I was always smiling then, too.

The rebels would make us do this, stand in a circle, to watch the girls in the centre dance.

Instead of dancing, the girls would be beaten. You had to watch and clap, stamp your feet. You had to show joy.

Some would fall to the ground. Others would wet themselves in fear.

If the rebels thought you weren’t taking part, if they saw you cry, you would be thrown in the circle. I would pray to myself, don’t cry.

We stomped and clapped and sang. Watching our sisters beaten. Their dancing bodies covered in petrol and set alight.

These girls, some of them were my classmates before, some of them lived in my village. At night we would huddle together, whispering of home.

You learnt not to show love. Not to show allegiance. To clap and to smile. I am always smiling now.

I know it hurts to hear this story.

Please – don’t cry. Don’t cry.

I learnt how to check batches of a hundred (four twenties, wrapped with one, nine tens, the same), to turn the fresh notes over so the Queen’s head was the correct way up, facing you from the right hand corner. To stack and wrap notes in piles of thousands and never to peel a twenty from the top and stick it down my pants.

At first, I would check piles someone else had a counted and then, when I proved myself, I would count the stacks of new money to be buried beneath the floorboards. I imagined the sweaty notes cooling in the dust, like burying the Queen alive hundreds of times over.

I was eight years old, it was the late 1980s and the most affluent time in my childhood.

For a period of eighteen months, my Mother was in a relationship with an altogether better class of drug dealer than she normally brought home. This was a man who felt five pounds notes should be abolished as they were too small, who had a different car every time he visited our high rise, who would break the legs of any man that dare criticize his Kevin Keegan hairstyle.

The studio, and the money beneath it, belonged to him.

Of my Mother’s relationships he was probably my favourite in that for the most part, he ignored my existence and I was able to do the same with him.

I saw him use money as an easy route to getting his own way. If he wanted to see my Mother and she was working, he’d pay her to have the night off.  When he stayed at our flat, he wanted better food and entertainment, so the fridge was stocked and a colour telly appeared.

Just as easily, when he left, the nice things went with him. I wasn’t bothered, except that he got me to mind the car while he went upstairs to take away the TV. It was the only time I remember him talking to me directly. I sat in the car, thinking maybe he and I were getting to know each other, only for him to come down, telly in arms, and leave forever.

I liked riding around in different vehicles, the Capri with the flames painted on the sides, the red Cortina, the white Escort Van that was petrol bombed outside our high rise. I liked counting the money too.

Funny, that when you see enough cash in one place it loses its meaning, but when you can evaluate the personal worth, it tempts you.  At some point during the Keegan months, I was flicking through my Mother’s books and found a stash of notes hidden in between the pages of DH Laurence’s Women in Love. She told me that he would often hide piles of cash in the house, unchecked and uncounted, in case he quickly needed a little money.

I begged her to take a couple of notes from the pile, as he would never know. She refused on principle. A few weeks later, when the house was raided and the drug squad had confiscated the money, she joked she should have listened to me.

All I could think was: you can’t keep a hold on money. More often than not, even when it’s in your hands, it probably belongs to someone else.

II

My Father had a very different attitude toward money. His favourite phrase was What’s mine is yours and yours is mine, always with an emphasis on the second part. He liked to remind me of this as a little girl, showing me around the houses he worked on, explaining his wealth and my right to it.

With it came the fact that we were inextricably linked in this life, that whatever I would go on to achieve or possess, would also be his. That was the payoff.

The phrase came from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, in the form of a marriage proposal at the close of the play. The curtain drops before the woman replies; it’s just presumed she will accept.

That was my Father, he didn’t wait for an answer – he was convinced he had you at hello.

While he promised me the very earth we stood on, he never actually delivered. I spent my childhood on the breadline with my Mother and siblings and had no contact with my Father between the ages of six and twenty-two.

When we did finally speak, it was by phone. Conversations happened on and off over five years, neither of us quite ready to meet in person. Then he died. I was his only living blood relative.

I thought about our inextricable link, the invisible thread he had worked so hard to create between father and daughter, and then I walked away. I didn’t want anything that was his, not his business or his house or his cash.

I have nothing of his, except his favourite phrase and I only ever use the first half of that.