by Craig Taylor
I’ve been singing and performing for twenty-odd years. I’m never the romantic lead, I’m always the fat funny girl. In Fame, I played Mabel Washington. In Carmen Jones, I played Frankie. So it’s always the character roles, and I love those roles. I did a film, years ago, called Knights and Emeralds and I played the rubbish baton-twirler girl. It was an all-black marching band and I was the one who couldn’t do it. And then I did a film called The Tall Guy with Jeff Goldblum.
I have done my stint of being a slave. You know? I’ve done my spear-carrying. I did Porgy and Bess and it felt good … because we were all black and we were all there together. But to be a slave. … I’m getting a little too old for that shit. So I said to my agent, ‘I don’t want to be a slave any more. Because it’ll just make me really unhappy, and I’m done with, “Yessir” [Deep South accent].’ Didn’t wanna do it.
So after I finished Porgy and Bess, I was like, what do I do? Do I do plastering? Shall I be an airline pilot? Ah. … No! I didn’t get far on that one. I just thought I’d look great in epaulettes! Trolley dolly? I thought, nah … I’m not that patient with the tea. And dealing with shirty, horrible people? I do that anyway. Then I found this plumbing course and it really suited what I needed.
There’s no female plumbers. There’s absolutely no female plumbers. When we talk about it, everybody wants a female plumber. I would prefer to have a woman stumping through my house than a guy stumping through my house.
Every job is different. I never know whether people are going to accept me, I’m always mindful of … you know, they open the door and I see it in their eyes: ‘Errr …’ I think I’m quite an open, quite an easy person. But if you don’t know me, all you see is a black woman with dreadlocks, you know, me in overalls with a headscarf and my locks sticking out. And for some people, that’s threatening. But I was like, ‘I’m gonna turn up at their house, full-slap, with a really sexy outfit on.’ Gonna be like: ‘Ommp!’ [Laughs.] And hook up with lovely bored housewives. Lots of housewives and neither are they lovely or bored. Probably bored but not interested in me! [Laughs.]
Everywhere I go, I think, I wonder how their plumbing is in the kitchen … And I look to see what the plumbing is. Then I figure out whether I could have done it neater and hidden those pipes a little bit better, because the whole idea of plumbing is that it’s available, it’s there, but you can’t see it. And it needs to be neat, and clean, and tidy. That’s why I think women are better plumbers than men.
With old houses, you’ve got the old lead pipes. It’s a nightmare to cut lead pipe, because you have to hacksaw it. You can’t just use your pipe-cutter. So you’re trying to hacksaw away at that and then connect lead pipe to copper pipe, and it’s really difficult. I hate it. But I’ve always loved lead pipes, and I just think, I wonder how long ago that was put up? It was in Victorian times when they started doing all the pipe work and you think, wow, what must it have been like without the sewers? It does intrigue me, but when you get into a house, all I’m thinking about is they want me in and out as soon as possible. I need to see what the problem is, I need to assess it and I need to get on with it, so you don’t have the opportunity to sit and think about it, all you’re doing is problem-solving. And you need to problem-solve.
I prefer to work with other people but I’ve got used to being on my own. I take my radio, listen to Radio 7. Which also surprises people because I say, ‘Do you mind if I put my radio on?’ and they go, ‘What are you going to put on?’, thinking, you know: high energy [she makes noise of pumping music]. And I go [posh voice], ‘Radio 7, it’s got great plays.’ And they go, ‘Oh, okay.’
I find it easier to concentrate when I’ve got something talking at me. And then they don’t have to listen to me breathing. When I first started I caught myself in the mirror jumping up and down going, ‘Fuck it!’ And then there are times where I just say, ‘Calm down. You need to calm down here,’ but I’ll just say it quietly: ‘You need to calm down, Ruby. You’re not going to get the job done if you don’t calm down.’ And then I calm down, and then the job’s done, and then I go, ‘Well done, Ruby! Good job!’ I did a job a couple of weeks ago and I had to do brickwork outside cos somebody had sledge-hammered … Terrible, terrible botched job. Polish workers had done a runner from this job, didn’t complete it. They put bits of pipe together that were broken. And when it was leaking they just covered it with cement, hoping that would solve the problem. And of course it didn’t. So I had to go and fix it, put it back together again. And I had to do the brickwork and I’m like, ‘Never done brickwork, I’m a plumber!’ And so I pulled it apart, put it back together again, and it was one of the best jobs I’ve ever done and I’m like, ‘Yeah, good job, good job.’ The woman had gone out and I was like, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’
I do like my plumbing, I love it actually. And I love the fact that when people used to ask what I do, and I’d say ‘I’m a singer,’ they’d go, ‘Oh, wow, that’s amazing, that’s amazing!’ And now, when I say I’m a plumber, people still go, ‘Oh, wow, that’s amazing, that’s amazing!’
KAMRAN SHEIKH
Currency trader
He is tall, maybe 6 ft 3 in., and his eyes are large, magnified, watery. We meet in a cafe near his office, not far from Bank station. The commuters walk swiftly past, umbrellas under their arms. ‘The Fire of London’, he says, ‘started in Pudding Lane, which is two minutes’ walk from here. That’s where the baker was and what happened? Fire.’
I’m a technical analyst of emerging markets. Most people understand technical analysts as IT-related but in this particular field it’s more trend analysis and the price-section analysis of markets. I look at price and I cover Eastern European countries, and also Brazil and Mexico. Basically it’s a little bit of everything. I have got five screens in front of me, three at face level and two on top. I have two PCs. One PC has three screens so I can open multiple windows because there are multiple programs running. I can open them with different screens and watch the live prices coming in.
On one screen I have a list of all the instruments I watch. I do about 20–25 financial instruments, which are a mixture of bonds, currencies and stock-market indices. I monitor not only those but also slightly non-related markets that I like to watch. I’m not covering the American stock market but I like to see its direction because it affects emerging markets. Although my role is mostly Eastern Europe I like to see the yen, dollar, euro. Everything else is fine but I like currencies. I think the currency market is a very active market. London is the world centre of currency, I don’t know the exact figure but it’s something like … it’s in trillions of currency traded every day. It’s huge.
I feel a part of that trade. Being a small part of something really big, it makes me quite happy. Every big bank in the world has an office in London, every financial institution has an office in London, and in London time they trade very actively, those currencies. London time is key. London is key. So it’s all active. The other items like government bonds and other instruments are quite dull but the currency market is active and there’s volume and there’s something always happening.
If it was a human being, government markets would be a very old, ugly woman. On the other hand the currency market would be a very attractive blonde. Stock markets are something in between – more deep. I would see the stock market as a thinker, an intellectual person, so you can go inside the mind and there are sectors and sub-sectors that can be divided. Everywhere there is something happening within one market. When I say the currency market is an attractive blonde I mean that she can hurt you badly. She is very flirtatious and unfaithful. She can make you feel great, take you to heaven, and make you really hurt as well.
I was born in Pakistan but I spent most of my childhood, up to 13, 14, in Libya and other Middle Eastern countries in the middle of the Sahara. We were literally in the middle of the Sahara because my father was a geologist and he was working on water projects that would help build irrigation in really rural ar
eas.
My father was at work, my mother was at home. My schooling started quite late so I was kind of just alone. That formed my personality in a certain way. I also had some trouble with my health, some eye problems. I had retinal detachment – I have a genetic reason for that, Marfan Syndrome, which makes me tall and causes eye problems. I lost one eye because of retinal detachment. They did surgery but they couldn’t fix it. And then I had retinal detachment again in the other eye, but they operated and it was saved.
We lived for a long time in the middle of nowhere, in such a basic town there was no sewage system. Inside the house the toilet was fine, but it went outside our main door to a hole in the ground, which was obviously covered. Once every week or two weeks a tanker would come to suck everything away. That used to be the most exciting thing for me – to see the tanker coming.
Outside the town there was nothing, just sand and desert plants, so it was very depressing. I didn’t see rain. I don’t remember seeing rain even once in those ten years. That’s what everyone complains about in London, especially English people who were born here. But I love walking in the rain, it has a beauty no one notices. It has freshness, it brings freshness. The air gets clean – it’s fresh, it’s life. The desert is closer to death. This is life because rain falls, grass grows. This is something people don’t appreciate.
When we moved back to Pakistan my father was getting involved in the stock market and I was quite attached to my father. I used to discuss with him what happened in the market, how it happened, all these things. Those days there was no Internet so he used to go to the local stock exchange in Lahore which had trading hours of ten to two or three o’clock. The trading took place in the Karachi stock exchange, but he used to go to the broker’s office who had a screen with the rates and everything. Again, very basic. Each day he’d come home and tell me what happened.
This was my first exposure to the markets. I started to write prices down. I selected 100–200 companies and every day after school or college I used to spend an hour or two and I used to make a big register. I made columns and I used to write the price every day. I wanted to know how prices moved. Then I thought it might be a good idea to plot it on a chart so I bought graph paper and started putting it there. I just got into it. That was my hobby and passion.
Until 1999 I worked in Pakistan. I was working in a brokerage firm that was based in Pakistan but was doing business abroad in America. The problem was this business was not regulated in Pakistan so more firms started to pop up, take money and then disappear – a lot of frauds and those sorts of things. I really wanted to make a career in this field. So in ’99 I moved to the UK.
Before coming here I sent letters to about 100 companies, writing about what I have been doing in the last five years and what I want to do and that I want to make a career here and what are my chances, what are my prospects. I got about sixteen or seventeen replies. Some people said you’ll have no problem finding a job here. Some people said a one-eyed person is better off in the kingdom of the blind, stay there and do what you can.
I had the feeling I would get what I wanted. After I came here it was completely different. Here nobody cares what experience you bring from Pakistan or anywhere in the world. Nobody gave a damn. So I found a job at a fried chicken restaurant in South London, near Sutton. Chicken was a job that was much harder than I expected. It doesn’t look as tough when you go in to buy chicken. Working there was not good. Everything gets dirty, the smell of the chicken is everywhere, the customers are nasty, and everything is greasy. The back area, you have to clean it. After working there you don’t want to eat there any more. The bus ride home was terrible. It was really, really depressing. I was tired, frustrated, desperately wanting a change. This is what I experienced in the first few years. Loneliness, while living with 7–8 million people but still being so lonely, not having friends. And what would I eat? Fried chicken. I would take something from the restaurant.
I didn’t forget that other part of my life. During all my jobs, in factories and chicken restaurants, one mistake I made was that I always told people what I wanted to do, what I had been doing, what I planned to do in London and that caused me a lot of trouble. In Pakistan, we have a big respect for educated people, so if you tell somebody you’re educated, people will respect you even if you’re doing a tough job. I had this same expectation here. Each time I was working in a fried chicken restaurant or a factory or anywhere I shared this – I always said where I was going when I had an interview. I told them this is what I plan to do, this is my background, this is my main profession, my passion. This is what I had been doing in financial markets, I’m doing some exams and improving my qualifications, I’m looking for a job in this field. After that they got really nasty towards me.
I was living in Morden, the last stop on the Northern Line. Mostly I lived in rented rooms in a shared flat. One place was with two guys, one a teacher in a college and the other a Nigerian working for ExxonMobil. It was just basically nothing – we used to see each other if we ran into each other while waiting for the toilet or in the kitchen. Everybody was in their room.
I joined the Society of Technical Analysts of the UK. They hold a monthly meeting for about 150 people and they invite a speaker, a prominent analyst, who speaks about the market or techniques. So I started coming to those meetings. That was an opportunity for me for a change, working at the chicken restaurant or the photo shop I worked at after. To dress up nicely, to put on a suit and tie and come sit with people, London people, completely different from where I was. They were mostly white English, I think I was the only Asian there. It so much increased my confidence, just putting on a better outfit and talking with professionals working in the City. For a while I feel that I’m a part of this different world, and I listen to the lecture. But after the lecture the painful part starts.
Afterward there is a gathering where people socialize with each other, networking, and I thought it might get me some contacts with people and help find me a job. I’d say I was not working as an analyst at the moment but I was looking and I had a history of four or five years in this field. They would ask me where I had worked and when I would say in Pakistan, then they were not too interested. It was extraordinary for them that someone from there would be doing those sorts of things. But one guy was interested, he even introduced me to his boss, who was the speaker. He asked me, what is your main area of interest? I said I’m most interested in currencies, dollar and yen exchange is my favourite. He smiled. He started talking about it but I was not in touch with the market, I didn’t know what was happening. So I started thinking, who am I? Do I belong here? What am I doing here? It was depressing, and when it finished I used to walk the streets. I didn’t want to go home. Where was I going? Back to Morden. After a year or so I stopped coming because I realized it gives me less pleasure and more depression and disappointment.
A cousin in Morden told me, are you living in a fool’s paradise or what? Put your mind on what you are doing. Even if you are sweeping floors, put so much effort and dedication into it you can grow from there, and one day you might have a cleaning company. You can always excel in what you are doing. But I felt that you can’t find success until you have an aptitude for what you are doing.
I kept applying, and when I found out about this job I was living in East Sheen, working in a pawnbroker and cheque-cashing place. This was a huge feeling of insecurity. I had three interviews with five different people, and finally when they confirmed the job it was the happiest day of my life. I was a technical analyst – junior. Sorry, I was a trainee. But I was very happy, very very happy. What they offered me was a lot lower than what I was expecting. Because they knew during the interviews what they were getting, although I tried to present very differently. The HR person was very clever. She got an idea of my circumstances, how desperate I was, so they offered a lot less. When they told me I was definitely happy. There was the moment they said I could negotiate. I could have got a lot better but
I was so afraid of negotiating. I just asked for a little, little more and then said, it’s fine, fine, don’t worry.
I was so happy. I was not believing it. It was after so many years – the confidence had decreased so much that even after one month on the job I didn’t resign from the pawnbroker. At first I told them I have to go to Pakistan because my father is sick so I’ll be gone for two weeks. Because I was thinking it can’t happen, it can’t be, it’s too good to be true. It was just a false thing. It will not happen. My father’s sickness was the best excuse I was able to come up with. And then after two weeks I came back and said I was sick.
I don’t know. Those years had really damaged my thinking and approach and made me so insecure. After one month I thought, now, that time has passed and I still have a job, I’m still here and it seems like it will continue. I finally resigned from the pawnshop. They had been calling me all the time telling me come back, what is wrong?
I remember my first day going into the City, I woke up in East Sheen and put on my suit. I took the train from Mortlake Station to Waterloo, changed to the Waterloo and City Line and came to Bank. The office is on King William Street, across from Bank station. I went to reception, signed in, told them I was starting work there. I came upstairs, saw the receptionist at my floor, sat there and after a few minutes my boss came and he took me to the place I was supposed to be.
