I’m sitting here waiting for another evening shift to end and I find myself thinking back to my previous call centre job and the times I worked evening shifts there.

Sometimes I think back to that job and remember as to how it was, but – and I think I written about this before – there are times when I miss it, though it’d be more accurate to say that I miss the people.

Well, in a way I miss the environment, but it’s more the space than the environment generated by management, but anyway.

I remember times when I’d be writing in the last ten minutes of the shift and I’d be trying to get the writing done as quickly as possible due to when trains left the station at St. Leonards, or when I was cycling due to not wanting to be home a few minutes later if I could avoid it, as the place wasn’t the most pleasant.

I remember a lot of stuffing about and… well, that hasn’t changed much, but I do remember it happening and I remember a lot of aimless conversations that probably helped us get through working at that place a lot more than we may have thought at the time.

I remember looking out windows and wondering about workers in other buildings, though not all the time of course. I thought about the landscape and it would all disappear when it was time to head on home.

There were plenty of times when the cycle was easy but I never stuck to it enough to get as fit as I needed to make sure it was a continuous occurrence rather than something that happened here and there. I remember listening to a lot of emotionally heavy music on that cycle too, and I remember how when crossing The Sydney Harbour Bridge the temperature felt like it dropped more often than not due to various factors. I’m pretty sure it was mostly due to wind and being above a large body of water, but there’s probably more to it than those two things.

Sometimes I miss that place and I miss the people, even though there are some that I’m glad I don’t have to speak to anymore. It was a place where I felt I belonged which is not something I feel is something I should feel, but at the very least I felt I belonged there more than I do here, even though there are people here that are just as friendly.

Maybe it has to do with the transient nature of call centres. Sometimes you end up being someone who stays for a while, which I was at the last one and am at this one, but I think there were more people there who stayed than here.

I don’t necessarily miss those days. They had a time and a place and I got through them and there was some fun, but I have no desire to relive them as they already happened. I wonder as to what has happened to those I no longer talk to, and I wonder if we’ll ever cross paths again, and maybe we will, but only as faces among a crowd.