Text 1: The voice at the end of the line, by Rachel Okon

An original contemporary magazine feature.

The ambulance control room is on the second floor of an office block on a business park, between a tyre depot and a gym. There are no sirens here. There are forty desks, each with three screens, and forty people in headsets speaking in low, level voices to strangers on the worst day of their lives.

Marcus Anane has worked here as a call handler for six years. Before that he sold mobile phone contracts. ‘The skills are not that different,’ he says. ‘Stay calm, listen, ask the next question.’ The questions are set by the computer, which uses the answers to decide how urgently an ambulance is needed. Marcus types while he talks. He is not allowed to skip a question, even when a caller is screaming at him to just send someone.

Most calls are not dramatic. A man has fallen in his garden and cannot get up. A woman thinks her chest pain is probably nothing. Some callers are rude, a few are drunk, and a surprising number ring because they could not get a doctor’s appointment. Marcus is patient with all of them. ‘You don’t know who’s behind the next ring,’ he says.

Last winter, behind the next ring was a man called Jamie, whose wife had gone into labour on the bathroom floor at four in the morning. The ambulance was eighteen minutes away. Marcus talked Jamie through the birth, step by step, using the script on his screen and his own steady voice. ‘He kept saying sorry,’ Marcus remembers. ‘Sorry for panicking. I told him he was doing brilliantly. Then I heard the baby cry, and I had to mute my microphone for a second.’

The hardest part of the job, he says, is not the panic or the abuse. It is that the call ends. The ambulance arrives, the line goes dead, and the next caller is already waiting. Marcus almost never finds out what happened. He found out about Jamie only because a card arrived at the control room, addressed to ‘the man on the phone’, with a photograph of a baby girl.

It is pinned above his desk. ‘Most days,’ he says, ‘that’s enough.’

Text 2: A letter from the telephone exchange, by Nellie Eccleston

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1889, a young woman tells a friend about her new work as an operator at a city telephone exchange.

Dear Florence, You asked what a telephone girl does all day, and I will tell you, though you will think it very dull after your schoolroom. I sit, with eleven other young ladies, before a great board covered with little brass holes and shutters, each one belonging to a subscriber. When a gentleman wishes to speak, his shutter drops with a click; I put in my plug, say ‘Number, please’, and join him by a cord to whomever he desires. I do this, Florence, some four hundred times a day.

The rules are very strict. We may say nothing to a subscriber but ‘Number, please’ and ‘You are connected’, however he may speak to us, and some of them speak dreadfully. One old gentleman shouts as though he had to make himself heard in Manchester without the wire, and another believes I listen to his business, and tells me so. Miss Cockshott, our supervisor, walks behind our chairs all day like a cat behind a row of mouse-holes, and if she catches a girl talking she is fined threepence.

By evening my arm aches from reaching to the top of the board, and my ears ring so that I hear clicks in my sleep. Yet I would not change it. I earn twelve shillings a week, and Mother says I walk differently since I began.

And there are moments, Florence. On Tuesday night, near closing, a shutter fell and a woman’s voice, quite broken, begged for Doctor Marsh, for her child had the croup and could not breathe. I had her through to the doctor’s house in less time than it takes to tell. I heard him say, ‘I am coming now.’ Then the line went quiet, and another shutter fell, and a gentleman wanted his wine merchant.

I shall never know whether that child lived. I have thought of her every hour since.

Your loving friend, Nellie

Both of these texts are about the work of answering telephone calls.

Compare:

• what the writers say about this work
• how the writers present the experience of doing it

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