I will apologise in advance to anyone who actually manages to finish reading this.  It's simply a collection of mindless ramblings about my career history and how I came to enjoy writing. 

The dizzy heights of a real working life began for me in 1995, after leaving college with three A-Levels in English Literature, French and Sociology…unrelated, random subjects which pointed quite clearly to the fact that I didn’t have a clue what to do with my life.

My only experience of the world of work before then was operating the till and stacking shelves at WHSmith over the Christmas holidays…memorable because at just sixteen years of age it was the first time I felt old, after having been called ‘that lady’ by one of the customers.  Oh…and not forgetting my three-week stint as a cinema usherette, decked out in a uniform two sizes too big and having to control endless reams of unruly kids, my being under 18 meaning I wasn’t allowed to supervise any of the good films.  Even now I can still recite all the dialogue from ‘Power Rangers…The Movie’ off pat…a skill which for some reason never made it onto my final CV.

My first real job at a local radio station was found by chance more than through determined focus.  I applied for a work experience placement, which eventually led to a permanent job in the Sales Department – typing proposals for a loud, belligerent all-male sales team who took their wedding rings off on Friday nights out.  It was there that I met my first supervisor, the battleaxe for whom you feel strange affection that I now know to be mandatory in most offices.  She was an overbearing, fifty-a-day smoker (you could smoke at your desk in those days) who even now I can still hear over my shoulder criticising my paragraph spacing and is the reason why I lose sleep if I don’t spell-check all my work at least three times. 

The managing director was a loud-voiced, boozy, larger than life character who during my brief period of working there had at least three heart attacks (it was always variously commented that while in hospital it was red wine rather than blood being pumped through the hospital tubes through his veins).  My three-month appraisal with him consisted of his shouting out of the office door to my supervisor… “Liz, does she fuck up the typing?  No?  Good – you can stay then.” 

I got drunk for the first time in my so-far relatively sheltered life whilst working there; during my ‘Welcome to the Company’ lunch at which red wine and slurred conversation flowed freely and merrily.  The amused eyes of my colleagues were all on me as I lurched back to the office three hours later, attempting to make tea for a directors’ meeting and putting salt in the sugar bowl (by mistake, obviously…)
 

I’d had enough of not-fucking-up-the-typing after a year in the job and moved on to call-centre work for a cable television company.  To my tender 19 year old ears this was akin to torture; strangely for a teenager I’d never been exposed to a lot of swearing in everyday conversation and some of the calls I took would have put the likes of Gordon Ramsay to shame.  For the first week or so I periodically fled the call centre in floods of tears, although it didn’t take long for the indifference to set in, and I liken that period to losing my innocence of youth somehow.

We had meticulous (or should that be ridiculous?) targets to work towards…wind up each call in three minutes or less and take over a hundred calls a day.  No mean feat when the amount of calls we received in totalled close to one hundred at any one time; one glance at the “calls waiting” board was enough to make you want to strangle yourself with the telephone cord. 

Some of the calls I received there deserved separate stories all to themselves; the one with the hysterical woman screaming that our cable TV installer had murdered her hamster being a particular case in point.  The company was run in a pretty shambolic style; we Customer Service Professionals (as we were ironically titled) formed a close “us against them” bond – the “them” being anyone who wasn’t part of our group; managers, customers and the like, and we amused ourselves by changing our names during calls, embarrassing callers who requested the Playboy Channel and inventing outlandish excuses as to why someone’s television wasn’t working… “Sorry Madam, only houses with even numbers are working today…”  “I’m afraid meteorites have hit our head office cables Sir…we’re working on it as we speak…”

Nevertheless, I kept my head down and was eventually promoted to ‘Team Leader’, the Holy Grail of senior management dumping grounds.  I was suddenly on the receiving end of jealousy from people 20 years my senior, all vying for promotion. I couldn’t for the life of me work out why these 40 year olds were so concerned about being promoted to a role at a tin-pot company in which vile members of the public were literally queuing up to scream abuse at you, after which you could console yourself with some freshly delegated paperwork that had all the excitement of a tour round the local tax office.  It was my first real taste of the sheer pointlessness that is office politics.

Anyway, it didn’t take long for me to decide I’d had my fill of all this and I headed off to Lanzarote for a jaunt as a holiday representative.  I lasted a month; unable to meet the challenge of being “zany” on three hours sleep a night.  Still, I count that experience as one of the most life-changing I’ve ever had; there’s nothing like standing up and singing “Agadoo” on a nightly basis, wearing an unflattering day-glo orange T-shirt and shorts combo in front of fifty strangers, to blast any remnants of teenage shyness into oblivion. 

I returned to the UK feeling a bit of a failure, applying for random jobs in the local paper before finally being offered a Customer Services Manager role in a start-up mobile phone company.  I was the sixth person to be employed.  There’s something to be said for new companies; the buzzy, optimistic atmosphere was great and during those initial stages it was by far the most fun job I’d ever had, although in retrospect, lack of customers and therefore work probably had something to do with that. 

It was from there that I fell into the heady world of Human Resources, my being the only person who was managing a team and finding myself in need of guidance on how to do it properly.  Having said that, my very first recruitment interview wasn’t much of a success – the girl turned out to be a rather disturbed individual who had an affair with a Company Director and lied about having leukaemia…but the less said about that, the better…

Needing more of a challenge than the company could give, I decided that HR would be my speciality from then on, and I took some qualifications and got a new, full-time HR job in a company based on the docks, the location causing much merriment to my friends and family…I’ve no idea why…

That lasted little more than two years, during which time I had fun playing the “prim and proper” HR role, watching the dockers go red, embarrassed as they realised they’d just sworn in my presence and using my ability to raise one eyebrow to great effect (it produces a look not dissimilar to one my mother-in-law uses on a regular basis).  And I found that groups of men are just as bitchy on their own as groups of women, if not more so. 

But policies, procedures and moaning staff bore me…working for a company bores me and I have no idea what my talents are.  Maybe this has something to do with turning thirty imminently and wanting to conform to the society ideal of having “worked everything out” by then.  Or it could be my addiction to the excitement of leaving jobs and the thrill of not quite knowing I’m going to do next.  Either way, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that I need to know what I want from my life by now, or at least start working towards it.  I’ve never been materially driven; all I really want is to know what I can spend the majority of my time doing that would actually inspire and interest me.

I thought back to what I was good at in school…aside from looking out of windows and daydreaming, it was art and creative writing.  So I took a writing course and really enjoyed it, although I think years of conformity and policy-and-procedure writing have somewhat hampered my creativity over the years.  I was dwarfed by most of the others on the course, and will continue to be on a regular basis.  But I love the feeling of sitting down and just writing whatever’s in my head, seeing what ideas form and how they develop into stories.  I can lose myself in it, and there’s always room for improvement, always something to work towards.

Writing may work for me; it may not.  But I’m going to give it a good try, and who knows? – maybe this time I’ll have found something I can stick with.