by Gina Yashere
My next trainee position was with British Telecom. BT at the time provided all home communication services in the UK. Mobile phones were still in a fledgling stage, and the monthly cost of one was around the price of a small mortgage, just so you could look like a douche on the bus. Everyone still had landlines then. My job was as a telephone exchange technician, or what they called in the business a “jumper runner.” I worked in a building near Caledonian Road, an area of North London famous only for being the home of Pentonville Prison, built in 1842, which had housed people like Oscar Wilde and George Michael.
When I say “telephone exchange,” I don’t mean the type you see in movies from the ’20s and ’30s. I was not one of those women, fully made up, wearing a blouse and a pencil skirt, sticking cables into holes and saying, “How may I direct your call?” Every telephone line in the area came through this building. The installation engineers would connect the phone lines in people’s homes and offices to the cable boxes outside in the streets. From those boxes the lines came into the exchange, where the wires ran through a series of relay switches and circuits that organized and connected every call. These switches and circuits were arranged on huge frames that ran the length and breadth of the telephone exchange building and extended from floor to ceiling. Attached to the frames were rolling ladders that we, the engineers and technicians, climbed and rode along on whenever we had to run more wires to connect new telephone lines or change lines from one circuit to another if someone changed their phone number. This was also before everything was computerized.
We each carried screwdrivers and soldering irons to connect and disconnect wires to the mainframe. We ran maintenance and repairs on these lines all day and every day. For fun, we’d sometimes connect our listening equipment—which was used to check for dial tones on specific lines—to eavesdrop on people’s conversations, and sometimes we pranked the people on the line by interjecting with dumb advice, giggling, or just using our favorite horror-movie ghost voices to call them by name and freak them out.
BT was a pretty solid equal-opportunity employer. Originally all telecommunications in the UK were under the remit of the Royal Mail—the same post office that had recruited large numbers of West Indians to sort mail in the ’50s. A number of those postal workers also worked in the telecom industry, so at my exchange there was a mixed bag of nationalities. My supervisor, Roy, who was kind of the father figure and ruled us with an iron fist, was from Trinidad. Among my coworkers was Benjamin, an older man from Barbados whose accent was so strong that only Roy could understand him and would translate for the rest of us. I think this annoyed Benjamin, because he never spoke much, but when he did, it was like a scene from Snatch, with Brad Pitt as the Irish gypsy who sounded like he was talking gibberish. We’d all just stand there and stare at his mouth and wait for Roy to tell us what he’d said. There was Lisa, a white woman who practically bathed herself in the perfume Poison, which was very popular at the time. As soon as you walked in the front door of the building downstairs, you knew whether Lisa was working that day. She was very popular with the installation guys who came in to give us our cabling instructions; they would take turns trying to chat her up. She ended up marrying one of those guys, and they are still together to this day. Nobby was a young guy from Birmingham whose parents were Indian. He sported a mullet and a moustache and was the same age as me. We became firm friends and formed a little gang with Alwin, a young British guy of Jamaican parentage. He was tall, lanky, and had a firecracker of a personality. Every Monday morning he would regale us with stories of what he’d gotten up to on the weekend, from nightclub brawls to bank robberies. We were enthralled. The stories were so engrossing, and convincing, that Benjamin looked at us incredulously one afternoon and told us, “You know all those stories are bullshit, right?” Well, Benjamin said it. Roy translated.
That was our little exchange family. More like a foster family. I was there for about eleven months. Once I’d learned how to “jumper run” at BT, I was keen to move on to the next thing. Whenever I learned how to do something, another new thing to learn had to be lined up or I felt I wasn’t progressing.
The engineers who worked outside the exchange seemed to have a more fun existence. They went to different buildings every day, installing systems, putting phones in people’s houses—they had variety. They even drove company vehicles that they could take home. And they had pagers! Before cell phones became affordable for all, pagers were the cool thing to have. If you weren’t even an idea to your parents in the late ’80s to early ’90s, I’ll explain: These were little electronic boxes that you clipped to your belt. They were the first forms of mobile communication. If someone needed to get ahold of you, they called a number and relayed either their phone number or a message to an operator, who then relayed the info to your pager, which would beep or vibrate on your belt. You would then find a phone and call the number of the person who had paged you or the operator to retrieve the message. Yup, that was the height of technology in the early ’90s. Our parents’ generation walked fifty miles to school. Our generation had to get to a phone to have someone read us a message. Pagers seemed to be ubiquitous in the US, according to TV and movies, with everyone having them, but the UK was well behind on that technology. Here, they were not readily available for purchase. They were the sole domain of companies that could buy them in large quantities and distribute them among their mobile staff. Basically, to have one, you had to have a pretty important job in which you had to be easily contactable. Having a pager was equivalent to twirling your car keys in a nightclub to get girls. A pager hanging off your belt meant you had not just any job but a good job, an important job, and you drove the minimum of a Ford Escort. (Ford Escorts were cool back then.) And if you had the souped-up, sporty XR3, with a . . . wait for it . . . 1600cc engine, you were king or queen racer out in these streets!
I wanted a good job. I wanted variety, excitement, responsibility, and a damn pager. I began making requests for a transfer to the installation team six months into my time at the exchange. A position wasn’t forthcoming. These were popular jobs within the company, and everyone wanted them. There was a long waiting list. I was nineteen, well qualified, and a Black girl in an industry desperate for people like me. I was a hot commodity, and I wasn’t waiting for shit. I decided to leave British Telecom.
People thought I was crazy. BT was one of those companies in which, once you got in, you had a job for life. Nobody ever left a government job or BT.
I managed to leave both in just over a year.
11
The Same Sun That Melts Wax Also Hardens Clay
When my letter of employment from Otis arrived just a week after my interview, I was overjoyed. I was to be the first female lift engineer in Otis UK’s hundred-year history. For Americans, lifts are what you guys call elevators. Usually Americans are the ones who tend to go for the more literal, obvious words to describe things, like “fall” instead of “autumn” (presumably because the leaves are falling), “sidewalk” instead of “pavement” (because, of course, you are walking on the side of a road), but on this occasion, the Brits must have decided to give it a try and go with the box that “lifts” things.
When I was younger, I was actually afraid of lifts. I avoided them as often as I could, and when I couldn’t, I never got inside one alone. I would wait for at least two other people, so if anything went wrong, we’d all go screaming to our deaths together. Misery loves company. I didn’t understand how they worked, and I’d seen too many horror movies in which lifts plunged down the shaft, pulverizing everybody in them (The Towering Inferno), or they were taken over by the child of Satan and cut unsuspecting scientists in half like a sandwich (Damien: Omen II). So when I left school and gravitated towards a career in engineering, lifts were the absolute furthest thing from my mind.
The following Monday I was supposed to report to the Isle of Dogs office to begin engineer training, which would involve following an engineer around who maintaine
d all the lifts in that area. The Isle of Dogs is an area of East London that doesn’t have any more dogs than anywhere else in London, so the name is a mystery. It’s a part of East London that at the beginning of the century was full of bustling ports and trading, but it fell into disuse and poverty and was earmarked for regeneration. Glistening new apartment buildings had since sprung up among the existing drab council estates, and a whole new financial district was in the works.
I turned up on Monday morning, excited and ready to get started. I was assigned a uniform of a blue Otis sweater, matching blue trousers, and steel-toed work shoes, which I changed into, and I stood in the general area outside my new manager’s office, waiting to be assigned a work partner. A steady stream of white, male Otis engineers passed by to pick up their assignments for the week, and they all stared at the young Black woman dressed identically to them.
I had seen the advert for the job in the Evening Standard, a daily London newspaper with a great job advertisement page. Thursday was engineering day, so every Thursday, I scoured the paper’s job listings, looking for my next adventure, and this was where I found the advert that changed my life: a trainee engineer position with Otis, the largest lift company in the world. I had thought this would be a perfect way to overcome my fear as well as have a job with plenty of excitement, physicality, and travel.
That job advert had pictures of young, smiling guys wearing hard hats, holding complex-looking electrical meters, inside tall buildings with happy, smiling clients in the background. The advert promised great pay, opportunities for promotion, and, best of all, a company van after training completion. I was hooked for three reasons. One, the previously mentioned benefits. Two, I would learn exactly how lifts work, providing an opportunity for me to overcome my fear, or at the very least let me know if all that horror-movie shit was accurate. Three, and the most important reason, Otis was an American company. My childhood dream to live in the US hadn’t abated, and my plan was to gain all the experience and qualifications needed to work my way up in the company, then transfer to the States, to work on gleaming American skyscrapers during the week and dance on Yo! MTV Raps at the weekend.
I sent in an application and secured myself an interview. The Otis UK headquarters was in a large gleaming building that stood out like a sore thumb among a long stretch of council flats and fried chicken shops on Clapham Road, South London, just half a mile from The Oval cricket grounds. When I walked into the area where several other interviewees were waiting, I found that not only was I the sole female applicant—this part didn’t surprise me too much; after all, this job entailed climbing up lift shafts and presumably dressing in a boiler suit and steel-toed Doc Martens every day—but also I was the only Black applicant. I saw a sea of white, expectant, male faces that all turned in unison to stare at me as I took my seat. I didn’t feel self-conscious at all. In fact, I was extremely confident. I had great exam results from school, I had already begun studying part-time for my electrical engineering higher qualifications, and I already had a year of practical engineering experience under my belt. Most of these boys looked like they’d been forced to be there by their dads. “Get a trade, son!” I was like a raisin in a bowl of white rice.
My interview was with three white men in suits who bombarded me with questions that I answered easily. I’d done research on the company beforehand, to show my enthusiasm, and to demonstrate my ambition I discussed the career arc I envisioned for myself within the company. Within a few minutes of the interview, I knew I had the job. I thought I’d take a risk: I informed them of my current studies and that in my previous job I’d had a paid day off each week to go to college, plus I attended two evening classes a week, and I was expecting the same benefits at Otis, if I was to reach my full potential. They agreed that if they offered me the position, they would allow me to continue with these commitments. This was the opportunity I’d been waiting for.
But as I waited excitedly on my first day, I heard what seemed like a low rumbling argument coming from my new manager’s office, then I clearly heard the words “Why do I have to have her?” Followed by mumbling as the voices lowered. That was my first clue that my pretty uneventful journey as a pioneering female engineer was about to change. The office door flew open, and a small, scruffy, balding man stomped out, followed by one of the men who had interviewed me for the job, David.
“Hi, Gina. Meet Pete. You’ll be working with him for a bit, and he’ll show you the ropes.”
Pete walked past me towards the exit and mumbled, “All right, come on, then.”
I turned to follow him. Obviously Pete wasn’t happy to have me, and I wasn’t happy to not be wanted, but we were stuck together for the foreseeable future. I got into the passenger side of the blue-and-white Ford Otis van. “I ain’t got a problem wiv you,” he started, “it’s just I was promised a mate, and instead I get some sort of fucking diversity experiment.”
Most lift engineers in service and maintenance travel in pairs, one a qualified engineer and the other either a young apprentice, aged sixteen to eighteen, learning the trade, or a mate, which in the industry is basically an assistant and a general dogsbody to the qualified engineer. The mate carries the tools, gets the tea, and basically does all the shit jobs the engineer doesn’t want to do, while they learn the trade and, in some cases, move up the ladder to qualify, in turn, to have their own mate. I wasn’t a mate. I wasn’t experienced as a lift engineer, but on paper, I was more qualified than Pete and was the same grade as him. I was not going to be his skivvy, and he was understandably pissed off.
I let him know that I wasn’t just an experiment, that I was quite qualified for my job and that I was there to learn as quickly as possible and move on, so it was in both our best interests to get on with it. He agreed and started the engine, and we soon drove off to our first assignment together.
I spent a few months with Pete, on call in East London. We did monthly maintenance checks on lifts in the area and were called out on breakdowns. If you were stuck in a lift, it was most likely us who got you out. They called the fire brigade and they called us. Pete’s pager would go off, and we’d have to rush to a location as quickly as possible to get there before the firefighters, as their priority was to get people out, and they didn’t care how much damage they caused to the lift while doing it. A few times we didn’t beat the firefighters, and we’d arrive to find the lift doors peeled open as if with a giant can opener. That would cost Otis thousands in repairs and got Pete a good old bollocking from the boss.
In order to repair lifts, we worked in the room where the motor and all the electronics were housed. Sometimes we had to work in the bottom of the lift shaft, called the pit, where we would repair the wiring at the bottom of the lift car, as the car dangled above us. I often also rode on top of the lifts to observe their behavior, and I had ample opportunities for serious injury or death. There was the risk of crushing, whether by falling off the car as it traveled, falling down a shaft, or miscalculating the ceiling space left as the lift reached the top floor.
The job was pretty exciting. There was always the possibility of electrocution. We were dealing with high-powered machinery. I was once blown across a motor room, when my bracelet created a short circuit as I worked on a control unit. I was luckily only slightly injured, but that lift was out for three weeks, as I fried all the circuit boards. Which is why engineers are not supposed to wear jewelry on the job. I was also nearly decapitated when I was working on top of one lift that I had stopped in the middle of the shaft. It was one of a bank of lifts that had no separating walls. The others were still in regular service, carrying unsuspecting passengers up and down. As I leaned over the side of the car I was working on, one of those lifts hurtled up towards me. I got my head out of the way just in time. The job was dangerous, and I loved it. My mum had never let me have a bike, in case I died on it, and here I was cheating death every day in one of the vocations she found acceptable for her kids! We worked on everything from state-of
-the-art glass-enclosed lifts that traveled along the outside of buildings (wall climbers) to old metal council-estate ones that were rusty from years of people pissing in them. We found all manner of things thrown down the lift shafts, from old toys to packets of cocaine discarded in police raids. My mum had no idea!
Pete taught me as best as he could the practical side of engineering, while I studied engineering theory two nights and one day a week at college. We parted ways with a grudging respect for each other. I don’t know if he ever got that mate.
Ashes fly back in the face of him who throws them.
Canary Wharf, on the Isle of Dogs, was undergoing a massive regeneration. The developers, Olympia & York, were building an entirely new financial district in London, spanning a hundred acres. A slew of gleaming skyscrapers and office blocks were being constructed, and Otis had the huge contract to install all the lifts and escalators on the site.
David called me into his office one day to inform me that my training period in maintenance was up, and I was now to transfer into construction. This was to be the next part of my training: I had to learn how to build these lifts. Although I was happy to be moving on, I felt David’s relief at being shot of me, like I was being handed off to the next unlucky department as a booby prize. I thanked him for the opportunity, and prepared to face the suspicion and disdain of a new set of colleagues. I was sent to work in the building that would become the Canary Wharf Tower, the tallest building in the UK when it was completed. It was to be an exact replica of the two smaller towers of New York’s World Trade Center, which Olympia & York also had built.
