by Isabelle Li
I work in a telecommunications company, and my job is to solve customers’ problems with their mobile phones.
‘Hi Mr Harkins, how are you?’
‘Could be better. The red clock face has appeared again, and I can’t send messages.’
‘Mr Harkins, can I call you Chris? Where are you calling from?’
‘I’m north of the Harbour Bridge, not in the Blue Mountains. There’s perfect reception. I’ve told you and many others in your company, this phone is simply not working.’
‘Chris, listen to me.’ I have been trained that when a customer is frantic, I should directly address them by name. ‘Your phone is a smart phone, and it is like a computer. As you know, computers can get stuck sometimes. Have you tried taking the battery out and putting it back in?’
‘I have tried that. Yes, it works, but it takes a while to restart, and I keep doing it every day, and I can’t do that when I have an urgent message to send. This is a new phone and it is supposed to work.’ I hear his desperation.
‘Chris, go to the nearest store and ask them to send the phone back to the manufacturer. Please let me know which store you plan to go to and I can ring them beforehand to arrange it for you.’
‘Thank you.’
I look at the brick wall outside my window, feeling happy that I have helped someone.
The way to make the job tolerable is to see the office politics as games, and accept that games have a set of rules. If you win, the winner takes all; and if you lose, there is always another round. On the large screen above my head is a dashboard showing customers’ satisfaction levels, measured by the conversation time, graphed throughout the day. Underneath is the average for our team, and further down, every individual’s average. It is quite obvious who is ahead or behind.
I take one call at a time, do what I think is right, and if I am below average, so be it. But others think I am weighing down the average because I speak slowly.
‘Can you shorten your conversation time?’ my first supervisor asked me soon after I joined.
‘It takes time to resolve the issues and update the systems correctly.’
‘Then you need to improve your effectiveness and efficiency.’
At the end of every six months we have a performance review, and everyone receives a rating from one to five, one being outstanding and five below job requirements. I usually get a rating of four, which means I have met my job requirements to an acceptable level. I do not get the opportunity for promotion and my bonus and pay rise are kept at a minimum. This is a game and I am the loser. I lose graciously, not making a fuss.
I start at 8.30 am, not one minute earlier, and finish at 5.30 pm, not one minute later. I do not carry any anxiety from work with me afterwards. Compared to those who work fourteen hours a day and think about it during the other ten, I reckon I’ve got a better deal.
Lately there has been a new decree: every team has to keep their average annual leave balance down to ten days. I have had no reason to take any days off. Now I become the target because I have the highest leave balance in the team. It is quite an irony: I work more days than others, yet I am penalised for it.
My new supervisor has a broad Australian accent, and unless you have been in this country for a decade, it can be difficult to understand him. He has the confidence of someone who eats barbecue steaks and drinks VB. He gesticulates a lot and likes to use analogies.
‘Have you done the Office Wellbeing training?’ He starts with a leading question. I know it is leading, because the training is part of the compliance requirements, and our team is a hundred per cent compliant.
‘Yes, I’ve done it,’ I reply innocently.
‘Then you understand the concept of work–life balance. Do you know there’s a word in English called “burnout”? It’s like a fire; if it burns too much, it won’t last long.’
‘I know what you mean.’ I wonder if that is what he sees in me, a log of firewood, best burned slowly.
‘Your annual leave balance is dragging down the team’s KPIs.’ He is now using the guilt factor. For some reason, an individual can be lousy, but if the lousiness is impacting on a team, it becomes unacceptable. This is a country that takes sporting spirit to the extreme.
‘I feel terribly sorry that I have let the team down.’ I play on, to make him feel he is winning, since it is all a game. ‘I’ve booked a ticket for the middle of next month, so I can take five weeks off to go back to China, and it is just in time to reduce the annual leave balance before the end of the financial year. Hope it’s all right.’
He is taken by surprise. ‘Great,’ he says, without making the connection that a new product will be launched next month, the call volume will increase, one person down will affect the waiting time, and the graph will go south. I suspect that when he played rugby in his youth, the high impact caused concussions and he is showing early signs of Alzheimer’s.
Anyway, I am not going back to China but will have a holiday. I have a couple of weeks to plan for it. There are many places in Australia that I would love to visit. I have been saving them for someone I have not met. Is there any point in saving up for an unknown future?
‘You should try the Barrier Reef,’ Sam says. He is playing a new game that is based on puzzles, and his character is a handsome woman with a scar.
‘I can’t swim.’
‘You can go snorkelling. The underwater world is so bizarre that you feel like you are in a different universe.’ He shows me a video on YouTube, the tagline saying it won a prize at the last Biennale. A diver is swimming among the coral reefs, with the sunlight coming through the water, illuminating the colours and shapes, and a high-pitched woman’s voice is singing in factitious words. I watch the video over and over, mesmerised.
Can I housesit and travel at the same time, like all the other house-sitters do? It is bad enough that I cannot forgo my annual leave in exchange for money, and I certainly do not want to pay for holiday accommodation. I get on the internet and revise my profile to ‘willing to go anywhere in Australia’.
Two weeks have gone by and I have not seen any interesting housesitting opportunities: Avalon, NSW— house, 4 weeks approx, look after the house and keep the pool clean; Adelaide, SA—6 weeks, small two-bed house needs TLC while we are away; Koorda, WA— farmhouse, initially 2 weeks, 56 acre country property situated 10 km out of town; York Town, TAS— farmhouse, 4 weeks, looking for a special carer for 2 dogs and 2 indoor cats …
Maybe I should find casual work and forget about the holiday.
Finally I see a plausible ad: Blue Mountains, NSW—house, 4 weeks, urgent, extensive housework, gardening and administration work.
I send a response immediately.
It is early Sunday morning and my holiday officially started yesterday. I remember reading from the English Corner website that it is impolite to ring before 10 am or after 10 pm. The web administrator has forwarded me a landline number, so I have to wait. From the window I can see a woman shaking a doona vigorously in front of a rack of laundry on her balcony. At 10 am I straighten my back and sit comfortably into my chair, so that my voice will sound confident.
The number rings off. No-one picks up the phone. I try again an hour later, and then every half hour.
At 2 pm, after seven rings, someone picks up the phone. There is a long pause and a tentative ‘Hello?’
‘Hi, can I speak to Mr Mortlock, please?’
‘Hmm.’ He makes a vague sound.
‘My name is Ivy. I understand you would like someone to housesit while you are going away.’
He remains silent.
I have to attract his attention and force him to focus. I read out his number. ‘Are you Mr Edward Mortlock?’
‘Yes, I am.’ I can detect an English accent.
‘Mr Mortlock, do you need someone to housesit?’ I use my old trick again, calling out his name loud and clear.
‘Yes, someone careful.’
‘I can give you my references.’ I give him the names an
d numbers of a few of the most satisfied customers, including the doctor and the bonsai fanatic. ‘Can I come to your house to discuss the arrangement?’
‘Certainly. See you then.’ He is about to hang up.
‘Mr Mortlock, when would you like to meet?’
‘As soon as possible.’
‘I can be there at five.’
I open the internet again to check the White Pages: E. Mortlock does live in that house with that number. On Google Earth, I can see that the house is situated on the outer edge of the town, surrounded by a large garden.
‘Do you want me to come along?’ Sam asks on my way out.
It is tempting, but property owners do not like the sitter to bring in others. ‘Thank you. I can manage. Just haven’t been to the Blue Mountains before.’
‘It’s cold up there. You can borrow my coat if you like.’ His woollen coat is so worn that it shines.
I smile and turn down the offer.
I take the bus to Central Station, but have missed the earlier train by five minutes. The next train departs in twenty-five minutes. This part of the station for intercity and country trains is quite grand, and it looks very spacious without the commuting crowds. I get on the train. Sitting not far away from me is a beautiful but frail lady, elegantly dressed, looking out the window. Is she recalling a farewell from her youth?
The train travels through the city, leaving behind the old factory buildings with eroded paintwork and missing windows, and the low brick walls covered with graffiti that looks the same as graffiti everywhere. Bathed in midafternoon sun, the city reveals a strange charm, like that of a man with all his energies consumed and his perverseness tamed, pausing in a moment of tranquillity.
Cityscapes always fill me with sadness. I feel small, walking among the high-rise buildings. Wind finds its way through the corridors in between, and strips the trees of their leaves. Only the clouds are free; their reflections move slowly across the dark glass of the building surfaces. Once at a pedestrian crossing, a woman hit me with a roll of newspaper, for no reason.
The train takes me through Sydney’s west. In the old inner suburbs, large brick houses start to appear, and streets with small shops and quaint shopfronts. I wonder where I will live eventually, and when I will be living there.
As the train goes further inland, streets are dominated by fast-food outlets, and residential areas are filled with congregations of identical houses juxtaposed with large fields of vacant land covered by long grass. At a sports oval, a dark-skinned man is running alone.
A few passengers have got on and off. Someone is eating French fries with tomato sauce from a paper wrap, and a few others are eating potato chips from cellophane packets. The beautiful old lady is still there, lost in thought. Her presence gives me comfort.
The train starts to climb up the mountains. I feel the carriage shaking left and right, and the temperature starts to drop. I put on my beret, and wrap a scarf around my neck. I have worn my best winter dress for the occasion, and my only winter coat, so as to look trustworthy. I rest my head on the window and look up to the endless powerlines, green treetops and a deep blue sky, and start dozing off. I wake up whenever the train stops or starts.
I get off the train at five o’clock, cross the railway to reach the highway, cross the highway and turn off at the main street of the village. The galleries, antique shops, restaurants and real estate agents have all closed. There is not a soul on the street. At an elevated point, I can see to the west the pink remnants of the setting sun, and to the east a pale silver moon above the purple haze. The temperature has plummeted further. I feel the cold coming through my coat, hitting my thoracic spine.
I walk down the street, then up a steep slope all the way to the end. From the entrance, the house is obscured by the oversized conifers half circling the property, which have blocked the last glow of daylight. The driveway is a dirt road covered by pine needles. Wind sweeps through the trees, and I hear them whisper.
The house looks modest from the front, not nearly as big as I anticipated. I walk up the stairs and pull the door chime, which gives out a dull sound. The inner layers of my clothes have become cold with perspiration, and I feel chilled to the bone. After knocking on the door a few times, I take out my mobile phone, but there is no reception. I can hear music from somewhere. I walk towards the back of the house. A light comes on, and a man walks out of the side door towards the backyard.
‘Excuse me! Is that Mr Mortlock?’ I ask.
He turns to look at me, but I can see only his lanky silhouette against the floodlight. ‘You must be Ivy.’
‘Yes, Mr Mortlock. I tried the doorbell, but you didn’t hear me.’
‘I don’t have visitors very often. The doorbell’s got rusty.’ He chuckles.
I can now see him more clearly. I guess he is between forty-five and fifty-five. It is very difficult to tell the age of Caucasians from their faces or figures. The only reliable way is to look at their hands, which is impossible at the moment because he is wearing a pair of gloves.
‘I’ll get some wood. Can you hold the door for me, please?’ He moves swiftly between the garage and the living room.
It is an awkward moment when we stare at each other inside the door. At close quarters, I can see he has very curly hair and a distinguished face, although his back is slightly hunched. As on the telephone, he seems determined not to initiate any discussion about the housesit arrangement.
‘Mr Mortlock, I understand you need someone to look after your house while you are away.’ I have to start. It is not yet six o’clock, but feels later.
‘I’ll be away for four weeks.’ He glances around. The living room has cathedral ceilings.
‘What is required while you are on holiday?’
‘It’s not a holiday. My mother died. I’m going back for the funeral and to see my father, whom I haven’t seen for twenty years.’
Is he sad? Resentful? Worried? His face does not show any emotion.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
He walks towards the fire, and I can only follow him. He sits down on a sofa and I sit opposite. I have to ‘cut to the chase’, as they say.
‘Mr Mortlock, can you give me the exact dates?’
‘Sure. I’ve written it down for you.’ He pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket.
I am surprised that he is so well prepared. The paper bears his flowery handwriting and body temperature. ‘Excuse me. You meant the starting date to be tomorrow, Monday, the 27th?’
‘Is it not the 26th tomorrow?’
‘It’s the 26th today.’
I follow him along the central hallway to his study at the front of the house, walking by a few other rooms on both sides. His computer is still on and he quickly checks the itinerary. ‘Oh no, my flight is tonight!’
He hands me his mobile and asks me to ring a taxi, to arrive in thirty minutes. He finds a dusty trunk from the garage and runs around the house, picking up things. I wipe the surface of the trunk clean and pack all the items neatly inside. It is summer in England, so he does not need winter clothes. But he has to pack suits and shirts for the funeral, and I have no idea how to fold them. So I leave them aside, and eventually he puts them in a separate carry bag.
I hear the taxi honking and run out of the house to ask it to wait.
Mr Mortlock is now in an olive green sweater with white collars flipped out and beige trousers. ‘I’ve prepared the agreement.’ He gives me a printout, with the starting date revised with a pen from Monday 26th to Sunday 26th.
He has added the following additional clauses to the standard agreement from the agency’s website:
Ensure security measures are taken at all times.
Return to the house before sunset every day.
No visitors staying in the house. (The usual clause is no partying.)
Minimise interaction with the neighbours.
Housework and gardening as explained.
Secretarial and administration
work as explained.
‘I’ll ring after I check in. Can you sign it now, so I can take a copy with me? Your friends have given you good references. Also, I’ll pay you.’
I sign it.
‘You need to learn how to use the CCTV.’ He points to a screen in his study. ‘The manual is on the shelf.’
He does not want me to see him off outside the house, I guess for security reasons. So I shut the door behind him. I hear the boot close, the car door slam, and the car start and drive away. I turn off the outside lights.
I walk back to the living area. There is a large rug in the middle of the timber floor. I run towards it and do a cartwheel, and another one back. How very spacious! This house and the big garden are mine for the next four weeks! I throw myself onto the wrinkled leather sofa, my head spinning.
Tomorrow I will return to the unit and get my things. Then I will check the house thoroughly and make a plan. If the bedroom, bathroom or kitchen is dirty, I should clean them first. It is important to eliminate all the dust; otherwise, it travels and ruins the cleaned surfaces. High shelves can be challenging and I might need a ladder. Timber floors like these are easier to clean than carpet, although most people prefer carpet precisely because it hides dust. I might leave the windows till the end so they look sparkling when Mr Mortlock gets back. Mr Mortlock, although weird, should be generous.
The coal in the slow-combustion fire is smouldering. Mr Mortlock brought in the wood but he did not top up the fire. My grandparents used a coal stove for cooking and for heating up the brick bed, and I used to blow air into the bottom of the fire and get black ash all over my face. I open the glass door of the stove, which makes a prolonged musical sound. The heat radiates onto my face and hands. I stoke it a bit and the flame grows bigger. Should I put on a new log?
The telephone rings somewhere in the house. I shut the door and run across the hallway. The telephone is in the study.
‘Ivy, I forgot to tell you about the heating in the house. It gets bitterly cold at night.’ Mr Mortlock starts telling me how to manage a slow-combustion stove, in a longwinded, step-by-step fashion. ‘I’m at the airport now. I’ll ring you again.’
