Notes from the Sofa by Alex Neve

Mistake Number Five: The Ten Years I Spent Working in a Call Centre.

Photo by Mike Meyers on Unsplash

Hi, I’m Alex. I’m a writer, I’m thirty-nine and will shortly be living out of a suitcase again, something I thought I’d left well behind in my twenties. Back then, I was a regular sofa surfer (thanks to everyone who put me up! Apologies if I cried too much or you caught me masturbating when I thought you were out).

Of course, thanks to London rental prices, my situation is unexceptional and I’m lucky enough to have been offered many a sofa to surf, but with several of my friends purchasing their first homes, some even their second, I’m starting to wonder how I’ve fucked up so badly, that I’ve ended up in this situation (again).

So, rather than moan, over the next few weeks I’ll walk you through a series of mistakes that perhaps you can avoid. I’ll have to go back to the very beginning to unpick the missteps that have often led to friends and family holding me up as an example of what can happen if you don’t work hard enough at school. It may, at times, contain foul language.

Mistake Number Five: The Ten Years I Spent Working in a Call Centre.

Every now and then, you’ll be listening to a podcast or watching The One Show, and someone famous will mention the brief window of time they spent working in a call centre for actors. That call centre is where I spent ten years of my working life (not acting).

To clarify, it's not a call centre offering a hotline for whinging actors to moan to other actors about how they didn’t get seen for the latest season of The White Lotus; it only employs performers. These performers are then plonked at a desk and made to handle calls outsourced from other companies needing additional customer support. The set-up is ideal for the jobbing actor (not just actors - we had models, singers, musicians, dancers, comics, puppeteers, poets, former child stars and even, for eleven months of the year, the UK’s Number One Santa Claus). By offering a zero-hour contract, it’s flexible enough to accommodate auditions and gigs. This is perfect if you’re actually sent on auditions and booking jobs, with some pissing off on tour or to film a four part drama, returning briefly months later like some special guest on a sitcom, but a lot of us just worked there. The industry is a crowded one, so for many, there is no escape for a bit part in Casualty or a six-month contract belting out Defying Gravity on a cruise liner, just endless calls from people crying about candles that smell like curry instead of candyfloss or screaming about a temporary traffic light.

It was an odd place: three floors of office space sitting above an accountancy firm and a floor housing a sex chatline, which often meant you’d share ciggy breaks with girls in nothing but lingerie and a flimsy robe. You’d be freezing in the February snow, and there they’d be, happily chatting away to you, face half contoured, rollers in their hair as if being practically naked in a shower of sleet was the most natural thing in the world.

Most people naturally assume this whole experience would be like an office-based Fame! With young startlets in leg warmers bouncing about, backflipping, and leaping over desks as they sing songs from Chicago, and sometimes it was, but mostly it was just a bunch of depressed, out of work actors in headsets trying to both use the toilet and sneak in a cigarette during their strictly timed five-minute break.

As with most zero-hour contracts, the pay was horrendous. You also don’t benefit from sick pay or annual leave. To survive, those of us who weren’t regularly acting had to do six or seven-day weeks (I was still funding my diet shake habit, so I was constantly on the seven-day cycle). Others juggled their shifts with a second or even a third job. As it was weekly pay, many of us were too scared to take the leap into something a little more financially secure, just because we were so used to an income every Friday. We couldn’t afford to go a month without wages as we waited for a healthier paycheck to come through.

The smart ones managed to escape. Often leaving to teach, become a PT or simply having found an affluent Sugar Daddy, and yes, some went on to have full-time careers in their chosen field, but I couldn’t seem to drag myself away. It was like an abusive relationship; all the red flags were there (poor pay, long and exhausting shifts, transient staff), but I sort of loved it.

On a few occasions, I bowed out, testing the waters of a more corporate life, but I got bored of the same old characters whittering on about their all-inclusive holidays. No one in normal offices had stories about which A-Listers liked a pegging or knew what it felt like to write a one-woman show that only five people watched. They were sane, happy people content with not being applauded for prancing about on stage, which I was both jealous of and didn’t quite understand. So after a few months of trudging along pretending to be professional, I’d phone the call centre, they’d tell me I could come back the next day, and off I’d piss from my proper job with paid sick leave and a holiday allowance, retreating to what I knew, safe in the knowledge that whilst I’d be poor, I’d laugh till I felt sick every shift.

And that was the thing, it was a hellish job, but the people were incredible. Whilst you were working there, even if you’d not performed in months, been dropped by your agent and forgotten what the fuck an Iambic Pentameter is, you were still a creative, surrounded by other creatives and I think that’s why I stuck around so long. I’d quit acting by my second year at the call centre, so I should’ve jumped ship, but I liked feeling like I was still part of that world.

Being a performer is not a heroic job, but it does take a strange sort of bravery (and foolishness) to attempt a career in the arts. It’s a ragged path, full of uncertainty, rejection and heartbreak, and as such, it often lands you in places like the actors’ call centre. So, being surrounded by these people, who, like me, had taken a chance in a field where less than 2% of the industry find success (and by success I mean scraping a living, not becoming famous - that’s around 0.04%), I’d found a home. Even if that home sometimes had questionable stains on the furniture, poo in the sink and a goods lift where people got fingered.

Whilst I take full responsibility for my refusal to enter the real world, clinging to a call centre role just because it made me feel creative adjacent, roughly 1.03 million people in the UK were employed on a zero-hour contract for their full-time job in 2024. For some, the flexibility may offer freedom, but for most, that will mean extensive hours, dragging themselves into work when sick and still not being able to afford their rent, let alone put money aside to save for a deposit.

PS. I should thank everyone who made me laugh so much that the job became bearable. Also, those who mucked in and got involved in all the bad scripts I’d written. To each of you, I say, “Look at me, look at me, look at my bum.”

Next Week’s Mistake: Excessively Reading About and Fully Buying into Manifestation.