The Occupied Stall in the Call Centre Toilet

You can sit in a toilet cubicle all day, with the door closed, and no one will question it. 

The only other place that I can think of, where this could happen is a church, although then there is the chance that a nosy priest might decide you need someone to talk to, and come over. Then, however, all you need do is put your head on your hands and kneel forward, and they will back off - even priests don’t get involved when you’re pretending to pray.

I have taken to sitting in the toilet. The building is big, with hundreds of workers who come and go through the doors of the toilet, opening and closing, flushing and drying. I sit there during lunch, with my notebook, looking at the creamy paper, scribbling down ideas, first lines, plots. Forty hours a week in this hellhole - forty-four hours, if you count the lunches over four days. 

It has come to the point when this hour, too precious to offer up to the bent heads over the facebook phones in the canteen, must be taken back.

So I sit in my little room, facing the brown Formica door. The building is full of teenagers, but the door is devoid of graffiti - well, it’s not school we’re in. No, in school they let you have pens. Not here.

For this hour, I empty my head of the babble of complaining voices. They dull my brain and make my ears burn, after three hours tied, by a headset, to a dodgy PC, one of two hundred on the smelly, dark work floor, the battery hens of industry - intensively tortured for cash.

The door opens. Someone goes to the stall beside me and she’s already on the phone. With only the partition between us, I hear her talking as she pees.

“Oh no! As far as he’s concerned he was only carryin’ on, but people have been comin’ up to me and saying he was all over her…naw, but I just told him if that’s the way it’s going to be then he’s sacked - fuck him!”

She flushes and leaves and the dryer roars.

Sit here long enough and you hear the world. 

There is little sympathy here for the weak:

“She was crying on the floor - that’s lousy.”
“She’s always crying, Sinead. She’s off her head. She cries every time a customer shouts at her and she shouldn’t be here.”

Or happiness for the ambitious:

“Aye, he got the job - ‘cos he’s a cunt!”

I close my eyes and listen to the silence when they leave. The door closes and cool quiet falls. In those minutes I wonder, if I left this place now, what would happen? If I just got up and walked out, threw my badge and my headset into the bin, on the way. But I never do.

My stall is at the end of the row. It’s warm from the air of the hand dryer that shares our wall. I start to write, and suddenly the pages fill, with streams of thought and voices in red ink. There is no interruption in the flow. I empty myself onto the page with writing that comes so fast that later, as I decipher it, I wonder where this all came from, all of this, that rushes out only because I have given it time? 

Then a stall door is locked once more and I lift my head. Someone starts to pee. There is the sound of water running into the sink outside and another person sighs loudly and talks to the occupant.

“I am so tired,” she yawns.
“What time are you on ‘til?” her friends asks.
“10. It was 9 last night and the night before, but I’m off tomorrow, so it’s grand.”
“Tonight’s our late one, too.”

There is silence, as Stall Girl gets herself together and leaves to wash her hands. Tired Girl goes on, as she waits.

“The wane’s teething and we’re up half the night with him.”
“Aw, really, have you nothin’ to give him - a wee spoonful of Calpol?” 

I listen, knowing that they are standing side by side, backs to the mirrors and the sinks, arms folded across their chests. 

“Do you know something? The only time I’ve seen him in the past three days is in the middle of the night when he’s woken up crying with his teeth. Marty has him away to his Ma’s before I even surface. Work/life balance, eh, what’s that?”

“It’ll soon be over and then two days off, sure. What’s your calls like?”

I hear them moving towards the door.

 “Aw, Christ, don’t ask...I think they’ve put me on the ‘crying bastard’ hotline today - it’s one crying bastard after another.”

Their laughter fades as the door closes behind them.

    It’s time to go, back to the floor. I have a call back to do, for a customer in her eighties. Her broadband’s gone down and she’s on her own. She was to call her son and ask him to come over, to help sort it out. She didn't want to ask him. He lives miles away, you see, and he’s ‘a very busy man'. 

It’s not that I mind calling her, she’s a very nice woman, but secretly I’m hoping that no one answers when I do.