Look who it is!

by Alan Carr

  Word must have got round about how great Manchester’s nightlife was because every weekend our friends, some good, some bad, some wanted, some unwanted, would descend upon our spare room. It seems in the first six months we must have taken in every waif and stray. Each Sunday morning there always seemed to be someone new to bring a cup of tea and marmite on toast in for. Our house became a halfway house, friends in between jobs, girls who had fallen out with their boyfriends, boyfriends who had fallen out with their boyfriends. We even ended up looking after a friend Ian while he convalesced. After having an operation on his spleen he decided in his wisdom to have some fun and went on a Waltzer in Preston City Centre; after about five spins, the squeals became screams as his stitches popped out one by one, so for a week he took our spare bed – all part of the service.

  One bonus was that Manchester had a Gay Pride weekend which as you can imagine was a revelation to me. Northampton had never had a Gay Pride; obviously, what they did have didn’t fill anyone with pride. It wasn’t floats and parades, it was a stall in Abington Park and two lesbians pushing a wheelbarrow down the high street. It was a start, I suppose, but Manchester delivered, a whole weekend dedicated to hedonism and being gay. I’d missed Mardi Gras by a week when I lived in Sydney but up here in the North West I was going to grab it and not let go.

  One night I went to during Pride was ‘Treat in the Street’, which was an extra special club night mainly because the council had opened up Granada Studios and the set of Coronation Street was dressed for a rave-up. It was meant to be a mixed night, but can you see any self-respecting homosexual missing the chance of dancing on those hallowed cobbles? The sight was hilarious but very surreal, especially towards the end of the evening when it descended into human carnage. People vomiting outside Steve McDonald’s, men snogging up against Audrey’s salon windows and a paralytic girl getting fingered outside Roy’s Rolls – it was all part of the rich tapestry that was ‘Treat in the Street’.

  I ended up chatting with a pre-op transsexual called Annette in the Rovers’ Return. ‘Tits and a dick, that’s me,’ she growled. It wasn’t just once that I checked my drink hadn’t been spiked. They never did Treat in the Street again, and frankly I’m not surprised.

  * * *

  After the madness of these nights, I had the grimness of my job to drag me back down to earth with a bump. Even the Manchester job market didn’t have much time for an out-of-work Drama and Theatre Studies postgraduate. The crappy temp jobs rolled on and on, one day cold-calling some poor sod who’d just got in from work, the next day churning out cheque amounts for HSBC. One place I was at for quite a while was the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless – or ‘Unable and Clueless’ as the staff so wittily dubbed it. Cable & Wireless, in all their wisdom, decided to build their headquarters in the middle of Europe’s biggest council estate, Wythenshawe. So every morning we would get on the 43a bus from Rusholme and journey into deepest darkest Wythenshawe. I don’t know why I bothered washing my clothes because by the time we’d taken the 45-minute bus journey and arrived at the Cable & Wireless foyer I was so badly stinking of skunk, I was high as a kite and smelt like a Rastafarian’s ashtray.

  Because I had a degree, I was immediately upgraded from answering the phones to sorting out meeting rooms and booking all the executives’ travel arrangements. Not only was I organising trains and cars, on some big jobs I was even booking flights, yes, flights. Finally, I was getting a job with responsibility. Then I got some even better news. Will, my superior, asked if I would like to be promoted to Facilities Manager. If I said yes, he could start me off on £13,000 a year. ‘Oh my God,’ I thought, ‘that’s nearly a grand a month after tax!’

  Things at last were looking up, and I accepted the job and the rise that came with it. I was on top of the world and told Mum that I was a manager and that I would be supervising all the Cable & Wireless facilities. Mum excitedly told Dad, and word got round that Alan wasn’t a loser and that in fact he was holding down a managerial position. The shine came off my job somewhat when one of the top executives came in and complained about the state of the urinals in the downstairs bathrooms. I carried on sorting out the facilities paperwork, not envying the person who would have to deal with that little mess.

  ‘Who here is the Facilities Manager?’ I jolted upright. Then the penny dropped. I had been a victim of the poxy rebranding that’s endemic these days in the office workplace. The ‘facilities’ were the ‘toilets’ and the ‘manager’ was the ‘attendant’. I was a toilet attendant. I wasn’t even one of those in Northampton. I looked at Will, who looked back sheepishly. When we had discussed ‘Facilities’, he had mentioned overhead projectors, board rubbers, the occasional making of tea, not popping on a janitor’s coat and swilling out a trough. I had been duped good and proper.

  My job didn’t get any better because we had what can only be described as a ‘phantom shitter’. Someone at Cable & Wireless was going around shitting in the corridors. I do not know to this day whether they just squatted there and did it, or they brought them in prepared and using a set of tongs plopped them in the corridor and fled the scene of the shite. They could have easily smuggled it in on the 34a bus, because I’m sure the stench of the marijuana would have masked any faeces that they were carrying. The phantom shitter was becoming a pain. I would be up to my neck in hiring out some office equipment to another site, only to hear, ‘There’s a turd on level 3. We need the Facilities Manager now.’

  * * *

  I never found out who the phantom shitter was, but I want to thank them because they helped me to make my mind up that I was better than this. Checking toilets, picking up excrement, surviving the bus journey through Wythenshawe, I’d had enough, and all the time I could still hear the waves of Bondi Beach lapping against my subconscious. I could still be there. This wasn’t living.

  I went to see Vanessa, my recruitment agent, and she said that there were job vacancies going at Barclaycard in the centre of Manchester for £13,000 p.a. Yet again, I was mesmerised by the amount. I’d never earned so much in my life. Plus, Vanessa had said the longer I stayed there, the more the wages would increase. In seven years’ time I could be up to twenty grand a year – it didn’t bear thinking about. I was tempted, so much so that I accepted.

  Call centres are dreary places. If you think it’s frustrating hanging on the line waiting to speak to a human being, you try working there. At least when I worked in a factory I could take my broom and lose myself among the shelving. But sitting there with my Janet Jackson headset, being monitored every second, being abused by rude people and not being able to move made me feel like a galley slave rowing towards the island Barclaycard called ‘Profit Margin’. I remember turning up to work and being told that Barclaycard had made an amazing £6 billion profit or whatever it was. The big cheese had sent us a letter saying ‘Well done’ and, because of our hard work, we were going to get – a muffin! Yep, you heard, a muffin. Either a blackberry one or a chocolate chip one – not both, said Mary, who pushed the trolley around. What had the executives done with the rest of the £5,999,999,999 profit, because this stale old muffin wasn’t really what I’d expected?

  The one thing I learnt from working in the call centre is that people are rude and people are stupid – and sometimes they’re both. If they are, they’re given a credit card and told to ring us up. Surprisingly, though, it was always the vicars or the reverends who were the rudest. It became a bit of a joke; whenever Rev or Vic popped up on the screen, you knew you were going to get some nasty man of the cloth being vile and abusive. No wonder congregations are at an all-time low, I remember thinking. Some of the queries bordered on the ridiculous. One customer had bought a DVD with his Barclaycard at a souk in Tunisia and – surprise, surprise – when he got it home it didn’t work. Well I never, sir. Who’d have thought it? I had to restrain myself from saying, ‘I’ve got some magic beans. Would you like to buy some?’

  The £13,000 a year wage that had so wh
etted my appetite was beginning to make me feel short-changed. Any spare money I had was spent on booze because it was the only thing that made the pain go away. It wasn’t just me. Morale had hit rock-bottom. As you can imagine, call centres in general were getting a bad press. It was rumoured that Barclaycard was going to move all its call centres to Bangalore and that we would all be facing redundancies. Everyone in the office seemed upset, but I couldn’t wait. Barclaycard tried its best to boost morale. We would have a dress-down Friday, competitions, nights out. Barclaycard would do anything to lift our spirits – nothing, it seems, was out of bounds, however surreal it felt at the time.

  We were all sitting there, wishing we were dead – as you do – when on the board which tells you how many customers are in the queue in bright red letters appeared the words ‘Mexican Wave – NOW!’ So all through the office we did a Mexican wave, still with our headsets on, still talking to an abusive customer oblivious to the fact that we’d all stood up and were waving our arms like a wind turbine. This, apparently, was to inject a little bit of joie de vivre into proceedings.

  It didn’t work.

  Every couple of months we would all be taken into an anteroom to discuss our progress with one of the managers. These discussions would be full of banal office-speak – think ‘outside the box’, try to ‘touch base’ with your supervisor as often as you can.

  ‘Do you know what’s wrong with some members of this team, Alan?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘There are too many people listening to W.I.I. FM.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What’s In It For Me?’

  What a load of S.H.I.T.! I thought.

  As always when you’re in a rubbish job, you tend to make friends more easily, especially at lunchtimes or breaktimes when you just need a smile or a conversation that isn’t debt-related. David, who sat opposite me, became a good friend, and as our friendship evolved he became not only a good friend, but also my favourite drinking partner. We’d often end up going out Friday night and then turn up for our Saturday shift shattered after having an hour’s sleep and nursing the worst kind of hangover. But it would be all right because Saturday was when we were allocated ‘Lost and Stolen’, which usually meant that the people ringing up were more hung over then we were. People who had lost their wallets, purses, clutchbags and tights the previous night would ring up moodily hung over, but still as stupid as ever.

  ‘Can you remember when you last used your card?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you remember what city you were in?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you remember your own name …?’

  ‘Lost and Stolen’ was great because the boot was on the other foot. We could take revenge on all those customers who had been rude and stupid over the previous week. We would talk quite stuffily and ensure that our voices were tinged with the right amount of condescension as they sheepishly revealed their drunken antics. Tutting and rolling our eyes as we took the moral high ground, little did they know I was dashing to the toilet every ten minutes myself to throw up.

  But even going to the toilet was becoming a cause of concern for the eagle-eyed, penny-pinching Barclaycard bosses. They introduced a time-saving initiative where you had to put down how long you were in the toilet and write down what you did in there, ironically, in a log book. We were told it was three minutes for a wee and five minutes for the other. They were right to scrutinise our toilet breaks because after a couple of horrible ranting customers, sometimes you did need to just get off the phones, and the toilet was the only place, sadly, to go for a breather.

  To be fair, Barclaycard did give their workforce some rights to protect us from the often mentally ill customers. If two swearwords were said to you during the conversation, you had every right to hang up. Knowing this, I used to egg them on.

  ‘Can you speak up, fatty?’

  ‘Can’t read your statement, twatface?’

  ‘Tell me to F off … please!’

  We came drastically close to getting a huge compensation payout when there were stories in the press that wearing a headset for eight hours a day could cause cancer, but thankfully, after a scientific investigation, this proved to be unfounded. However, it didn’t stop the office hypochondriac, Paul, from accusing Barclaycard of giving him a brain tumour. Obviously, this was a serious matter that affected us all, or it would have been, if it hadn’t come from a complete fruitloop such as Paul. He’d already had a fortnight off for an ingrown toenail, when he would hobble into the call centre on crotches grudgingly, only to discard them at 5 p.m. and mince unaided down Canal Street for a night of dancing. The illnesses continued. Then he started having weeks off for his deceased grandparents, other people’s grandparents, my grandparents, the supervisor’s grandparents who hadn’t even died yet. This went on until Paul’s work effort had been reduced to making cameo appearances in the morning before contracting TB or a tapeworm during his lunch break and disappearing for the afternoon.

  Hypochondria, ironically, is an illness, and Paul had it badly. Guess whom he latched on to? Yes, me. Every phone call would begin with a groan, or an ‘Ooooh!’, and for the next year I was burdened with all his illnesses. Before long, I wasn’t a friend, but a human landfill site for his miseries and woes, as a result ruining a wonderful friendship. We all have friends like that, dung beetles. Creatures that make it their jobs to wade through shit. I, of course, will be there for anyone if they’re depressed or ill, but some people really exploit this kindness. I find it all a bit wearing myself. Look, look at me suffering, I’ve got it so bad, oh will I ever make it to the dawn? I hope not.

  I confronted him once about this, and he replied sharply, ‘Friends are there for the good times and the bad times.’

  ‘Paul,’ I said, ‘there haven’t been any good times.’

  Don’t you think I’m lonely? Don’t you think I’m unhappy? Don’t you think I’m making the best of a bad situation? I don’t go around knocking on people’s doors going, ‘Boo hoo, I’m single, I’m ugly, I hate myself.’ No, I do a tour and charge people to hear me moan.

  The last time I heard from Paul was when he phoned me to tell me that he’d just walked in and found his flatmate dead. Charming. This news put me right off my meal-for-one. Why would you ring anyone up out of the blue and tell them that? This was all too much, and I changed my number.

  My situation probably would have been a bit more bearable if I hadn’t been struck down by psoriasis. The ongoing brawl that I’d had with my body had entered the next round, it seemed. Funny, isn’t it? How people’s bodies cope differently when they’re run down. Mine has always excelled itself with its perverse logic. You can’t get a decent job, you can’t get a man, you live in a dump, so what does my body say? You know what, Alan? I’ll give you skin like flaky pastry – my treat. If you ever needed proof that your skin gives out telltale signs of how you’re feeling inside, then look no further than me in that call centre, a scabby battery hen. I suffered with plaque psoriasis, a skin condition that covers you in scaly red blobs, which on my flabby body looked like I’d been self-harming with a bingo dobber.

  Plaque psoriasis rarely attacks the person’s face – guess where I got mine? Yes, on my face, and on my body, on my legs, on my arms, believe me, everywhere. It was awful. I stopped going out at night drinking, which as you can probably tell was my one way of letting off steam from such a drab job. I would go out, positive that everyone was retching at my skin. I’m sure they weren’t, but my self-consciousness overpowered me, and I just stayed at home and watched telly.

  As with all my humour, the negative experiences of my life after some contemplation and positive retrospection are absorbed into my act and (hopefully) become a funny routine. Identity fraud, rat infestations, being mugged, all real events that have started out as very grim scenarios, but have ultimately saved me from inflicting huge psychological damage on myself as a good punchline. That is definitely true of my times with psoriasi
s; it eventually became a stalwart of my act, always getting a big laugh and sometimes a round of applause. It made me feel like at least I was coping with it, if not getting my revenge on this horrible, disfiguring skin disorder.

  That’s why I found it particularly depressing receiving countless venomous and vile letters from psoriasis sufferers after I joked about it on the Royal Variety Performance. Apparently, I shouldn’t joke about it, it’s a serious condition. I know, twats, I have it! I’ve performed my stand-up shows in front of hundreds of people, covered head to toe in scabs; I can’t think of anything more empowering to a psoriasis sufferer, can you? Maybe I should just do what they do and lock myself away in a darkened room with a vat of calamine lotion and become a human scratchcard. For God’s sake, psoriasis sufferers, chill out – stop being so flaky. Yes, I know what I said.

  * * *

  I’d spent a whole year with Cherry and Sarah at that terraced house in Rusholme Place and our lease had come to the end. We all decided that it was time to move on. Sarah and Cherry wanted to start a family and settle down as a couple. Also, we were being terrorised by slugs. I don’t know what attracted them, but slugs were everywhere. You’d open the cutlery drawer and see a slug trail snaking its way across the knives and forks. Some would actually go slithering up the wall. They would be on the bed, they would go in our shoes, and the little buggers were quick – at mealtimes you would have to keep taking a second glance at your food to check that one wasn’t doing the backstroke across your chilli con carne.

  Another factor for leaving my first Manc home was the amount of rat shit we found behind the chest of drawers when we moved it. It seems it’s not just millions of hungry humans that flock to the Curry Mile every year. Evidently, the overflowing bins and curry scraps that littered the cobbled streets around our house were like an ‘All You Can Eat’ buffet to a self-respecting rat, and judging by the droppings, they’d come back for seconds.