Thursday 10 June 2010

Thank you, goodbye...

Last Friday saw the final operational day of my old workplace, the 118118 call centre in Plympton.

The blog started one day when I was bored of looking for work instead of enjoying my voluntary redundancy from that very place some 12 months ago. Say what you want about call centres and the people who work in them but half of Plymouth has been employed by that place at one time or another and I can honestly say I've had some of the best times of my life whilst I worked there, I met some interesting and eccentric people, I made lifelong friends and eventually, after kissing a fair few poisonous frogs along the way, I found a husband.

Working at 118118 was like being in the sixth form for an extended period. Sometimes we hated it but a lot of the time, we had a lot of fun. We had a lovely boss who used to come in early on special occasions like Valentine's day to put chocolates on all 200 odd desks, we had on-site massages which were subsidised by the company, we had pizza parties, and sometimes when nobody was looking, we used to play swivel chair Olympics.

So it is testament to how highly people thought of their time there that so many past employees turned up to the closing party on Saturday night.

A few months ago I made the (very wise) decision to stop drinking wine because it makes me go CRAZY, which means I stick to spirits now on a night out. Sensible in theory, unless you forget which spirit you were drinking so sample them all. And at least if you are drunk on wine, you know you're hammered. I thought I was acting absolutely fine, strutting around like I was Kate Moss, putting on layer after layer of lipstick every time I went to the toilets, and towards the end of the evening, just going up to people saying "I haven't got any money. Will you buy me a drink?". Yep, totally normal.

My memory of the evening is pretty patchy but I had a great night and it was a lovely send off for the end of Chapter 118.

1 comment:

  1. Although not my finest work, this post was a nice sentiment and it appeared in Plymouth Evening Herald on 15/06/2010.

    ReplyDelete