The Idler

Come Again

My worst job has got to be working in a mental health care centre last summer. I only managed two shifts. For a start, the house was in Hounslow, a place kind of like one of the outer rings of Saturn in terms of distant from Central London. Hounslow sucks.

Anyway, the job itself: I was shit at it.

My first chore was to take a young woman for a walk in her wheelchair. “You’ll have to chat and reassure her that you’re there,” they told me. She couldn’t talk at all and I’m not much good at banter - nevertheless I wheeled her along and managed to come up with some crap to mumble. I don’t think she liked me that much because have way through the journey she started to squeak a bit, and then began to cry. “Shit,” I thought, hastily backtracking and wheeling the chair around, back in the direction of the home. Unfortunately a wheel hit the curb, I hadn’t tied her in properly, and she flew quite dramatically through the air, landing in a bundle on the concrete in front of me.

The second mishap came when I had to get someone into bed. It shouldn’t have been difficult, I only had his face to wipe and a pair of pyjamas to put on. I only realised that I hadn’t put some of those protective plastic gloves on when he pissed all over my hands.

The second shift was the one that did it. I thought I was settling in on the second one, I really did. The girl in the wheelchair smiled at me, the catastrophe forgotten; the boy who had pissed all over my hands now held one of them as we settled down on the sofa and watched Eastenders on TV and another boy - I don’t know what his name was, Roger or whatever - was obviously quite taken with me. “What’s your name?” he asked me. “El - lo -ise,” he kept repeating, over and over, when I told him.
“El-lo-ise!”
“El-lo-ise!”
“El-lo-ise!”
I’m not quite sure how long it went on for. I was taken up with something else - trying to talk to one of the other residents, I suppose - but he kept going on and on, chanting my name in an ascending crescendo. Eventually, thinking he might actually want something, I looked around.

And there he was - or rather it was - a fully visible dick being wanked off very close to my face as he sang my name.

I didn’t know where to look.

Anyway, after that I decided that the job wasn’t really for me. A bit too much excitement - more than I could cope with.

To top it all the agency lost my shift timesheets, I couldn’t be arsed to go all the way down to Hounslow and get another one filled out, so I never even got paid.

Eloise Millar