My first real job, coming out of university, was for a company that offered ‘bespoke media monitoring services’. When I say ‘real’ job, I mean I’d done a number of miscellaneously mind-numbing stints in retail – but this was the first one that came with such civilised appurtenances as: desk (shared); communal microwave (often used to heat up Tesco fish pies, provoking equally communal pique); and personal e-mail account. The hours, however, were uncivilised. It was night work, and the hours were from 10.30 at night to 6.30 in the morning, in alternating shifts of seven nights on, seven nights off, working out of an office right next to the Tower of London (the joke writes itself).
It went like this. Over the course of the night, the next day’s newspapers would be scanned and digitised, then searched for client keywords. This content would then filter through to the fifty or so ‘analysts’ (us), sitting at desktop computers in a cramped, windowless room. For some clients, you’d be doing nothing more involved than confirming the relevance of the content that had been flagged. This was easy enough, but time-consuming, particularly when it came to the jobs where the client had asked to receive all mass media content that included a word as breathtakingly prevalent and polysemous as, for example, ‘energy’ or ‘virgin’ – which a surprising number of them did. For the bigger clients, however, the work was more complicated. You’d be assessing content for sentiment (positive, negative, or a third more mysterious thing), ranking it according to rules established in a client brief, and providing pithy paragraph-long summaries so they didn’t actually have to read any of the news clippings you’d spent the whole night meticulously contextualising for them. The company’s unique allure, from a client perspective, was the allegedly ‘industry expert personnel’ who prepared these press packs – which, as far as I can tell, is an elaborate way of saying we could all read. I was twenty-one, extremely silly and could not claim to be an ‘industry expert’ on anything besides mephedrone and the Cocteau Twins.
The shift would come to the beginning of its end when the ‘all-in bell’ was rung, usually between the hours of three and five in the morning. Beguilingly, this was an actual handbell – tinkled by our surly line manager who spent the whole night dragging on an e-cigarette – and it meant that the entirety of the next day’s media output had come through the system, and we could start sending off our press packs. The client roster was eclectic. We monitored for everything from government offices, blue-chip finance firms and members of the royal family to parochial hotels, reality television personalities and novelty cheese snacks. You’d flick from a Times report on a factory collapse in Bangladesh to a column from the Swindon Advertiser on a pantomime appearance by Dane Bowers, producing a dissonance similar to that experience when scrolling through a Twitter feed. Horror, hilarity. Horror, hilarity. Horror. By around three in the morning everyone in the office would be locked in an eerie, sleepless silence while we, together and yet utterly alone, contemplated topics as varied as vehicle theft, train derailments, dog shows, graveyards, teachers’ unions and Sir Alan Sugar.
Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end. But every day, for a whole week – boy, it really sucks. The endless negotiation of sleeping patterns, the feeling of isolation. Trying to sleep through the day in a shared house at the height of summer, and the bone-rendering tiredness when you can’t manage it. And in the winter, you’d barely see the sun at all.
I got into the habit of blasting the Radio 1 Early Breakfast show through my headphones every night to soothe myself with an artificial sense of solidarity with the broader nocturnal world, or stun myself into a liminal numbness courtesy of Icona Pop and Swedish House Mafia. And it worked, to an extent, though the only people who ever called in were truckers, and lads driving to the airport for stag trips to Alicante. But I think there was a relatively unique transmundanity to the night shift spent media monitoring. Something utterly perverse about feeling so removed from the physical world and simultaneously connected to its every development, from the tragic to the quotidian. A dried-out spider in the middle of her web. A shitty corporate Argus. A cyber-brain.
My notion in taking the job had been that I’d use the weeks when I wasn’t working to get down to the business of being a great writer (or whatever). But because I was, as previously mentioned, twenty-one and extremely silly, I’d often spend them exactly like the gurning hipsters who I passed by on my commute back east at the crack of dawn, wandering furtively out of house parties all along Cable Road, wrapped in faux-fur coats against the blue dawn chill. I didn’t get much done in those two years. But I did become needlessly au fait with the offending records of the small-time criminals on the Scottish borders whose antics made it to the hallowed pages of the Berwickshire News (Jordan Jeans – if you’re reading this . . . hi?).
There was also, now and then, a surreal beauty to the disjointed life of working night shifts. There were the glorious bloody moons over Tower Bridge, and a quiet stillness that I had never before experienced in London. There was a patchy little fox who’d sometimes shadow me my whole walk home, as if expecting me to keel over and die, so that he could eat me. And if I cut through Liverpool Street station on a Friday or Saturday morning, I’d see the Essex girls sleeping curled in piles outside Boots, heels kicked off, a dozen Flaming Junes with limp wand-curled hair, waiting for the first train home.
Image © Europeana
