Chapter 16
It took one day to get a job in London processing credit card applications for a well-known supermarket chain paying a few pence above the minimum wage.
New Zealanders easily found work in England. Our hard-working reputations preceded us and with our Australian and South African counterparts, to our collective detriment, we would take anything.
Processing credit cards was awful work with a ridiculous four-hour return commute to a white windowless credit card application processing building in a mysterious industrial park on the outskirts of a town with a name I can’t remember surrounded by farmland.
From zone 1 in central London, I travelled to work via four modes of transport – if you count walking. I took the first Tube from Earl’s Court at 5.55am then changed to an overland train and travelled thirty minutes to the outskirts of London where I met five other temps. Not one was a United Kingdom resident.
In twilight we New Zealanders, Australians and South Africans marched from the train to an army-style jeep with a khaki canvas back cover and sat on wooden bench seats. Like soldiers in office clothes, we listened to Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out of My Mind playing on Radio 1 at the same time, every morning.
It was October and, like soldiers approaching Gallipoli at sunrise, a sense of dread pervaded our little battalion, forcing silence. Each of us made small movements in the back not wanting to disturb others’ thoughts. We looked to Commander Kylie for words of encouragement. “I just can’t get you out of my head,” she warned us before the impending ambush. “Boy, your lovin’ is all I think about.” Watching the sun rise from the back of the jeep through flapping canvas listening to Kylie, I wondered and secretly hoped it would be our last sunrise together.
At the mysterious credit card application processing location we reviewed hand-completed credit card application forms scanned with text identification software. Our job was to confirm applicants’ details by comparing the scanned form with the text on screen and make corrections where the software had incorrectly identified text or left blanks. That was the job. And we had to do it fast because our speed was monitored.
At our single computer desks arranged in rows like an old-fashioned schoolroom, we faced forward, and, like a strict nineteen-fifties classroom, we were forbidden to speak. We temps sat amongst other permanent staff, mostly middle-aged English women wearing black eyeliner, sourpuss faces and cat-bum lips from years of smoking.
At a solitary desk at the back of the schoolroom sat a fat manager reminiscent of Sarcastic Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. He monitored our typing speeds and if we weren’t fast enough or were talking, he singled us out in front of our peers. In the fear-ridden unsupportive classroom environment in front of our co-workers, Comic Book Guy derided us and told us to work faster, threatening, “If you don’t increase your speed, don’t think about coming back tomorrow.”
And it wasn’t a threat.
One Australian girl turned up for credit card application processing with a grazed chin, hands, and knees after a night drinking with friends and playing “Jump from one moving red double decker-bus to the other.” She said it was her favourite London pastime.
At the back of the old rounded red double-decker buses is a small platform you can step onto while the bus is moving. The previous evening, Grazed Chin girl literally missed the bus and not only skinned her extremities, but presumably hit her head because after two days she was told by Sarcastic Comic Book Guy her services were no longer required.
The highlight of my working day was a chicken-tikka sandwich from a food truck. Because there was nowhere to buy food amongst the white buildings and farmland, at 11am a food truck arrived and tooted in the carpark. I would turn to Sarcastic Comic Book Guy who gave me a hurry-the-fuck-up look, then stand and walk the computer rows feeling the black-eyeliner-wearing-middle-aged-data-entry-clone-ladies hating me because of the perceived preferential treatment. Outside, I would experience my only sunlight for the day because we drove to and from work in the dark. Along with my chicken tikka sandwich, which I cherished, I got an additional ten minutes’ break.
I wanted to tell the ladies, who had probably worked there for twenty years, it wasn’t special treatment; my typing speed was off the charts so an extra ten-minute break was justified. However, having only been there a week I didn’t want to embarrass them. My level of success in the credit-card-processing game – to which they could only aspire – was typing speeds beyond their wildest East-Enders-watching dreams.
Halfway through the second working week, Sarcastic Comic Book Guy told our little foreign collective our services were no longer required. Instead of thanking us, he told us to leave.
I don’t think it was the credit card application processing wage that started to wear me down, because I knew soon enough Harrods’ creative department would contact me with an offer of a six-figure salary – not that I had applied for a job at Harrods but I believed that was how things would happen for me in London. It was in part England’s oncoming winter, the constipated grey-sky days and constant drizzle and the impersonal city devoid of nature.
I was getting closer to my unhappy place, I could feel mental fatigue.