There are two ways to get to this place. One is “entrapment”. That’s the industry term for when you get stuck in a lift, and it’s what brings people here from all over the country, day and night, via alarm buttons and down phone lines.
The other route is a kind of escape. A train through south-east London into the Kentish marshes, where the Lift Alarms Call Centre occupies a shed in the Swan Business Park, outside Dartford. This was the option I chose when I wanted to know what world exists on the other side of panic and to meet the people who wait there to receive our cries for help.
I had arranged to visit Jo one Sunday morning last year. She’s a manager at Stannah , the company responsible for all of the lifts at Network Rail stations in the UK, as well as shops, hotels, offices, leisure centres and blocks of flats. Although Jo worked with many of Stannah’s regional branches, where panic would be dealt with during business hours, it was this “national out-of-hours team” in Dartford that she cherished most. Before my visit, she gave me one piece of advice: “Bring your sense of humour.”
On the allotted day, I followed my phone map through Dartford’s last suburbs, up to a perimeter of chain-link fence. A small stretch had already been trampled down, either by foxes, previous pilgrims here or both. Fence hopped and shortcut taken, I was in the lobby within five minutes. Jo told me I’d been caught in the act: “We did notice you on our CCTV coming a funny way, sort of out of nowhere.”
The call centre’s building, and every other unit at the Swan Business Park, was straight out of the field guide for what could be called “1990s UK trading estate vernacular architecture”. Anyone who’s spent time at the edge of a British town would recognise the galvanised steel sheeting that wrapped around the roof and upper sides, which here was a dark shade of green. I like to think that these buildings inherited a design language from agriculture, their exteriors more barn than office. Nearby units were repair shops, mechanics, drilling contractors, fibreglass suppliers, commercial printers. This was, as Jo called it, “our little home”.
“I used to be a beauty therapist, you know,” Jo said as we sat down with a cup of tea in the kitchen before proceeding to the operations room. Mine was in a Mini Eggs mug (Cadbury’s, circa two-thousand-and-something) and the kitchen table had matching gingham-print coasters, tablecloth and table mats. Jo left the world of beauty therapy and entered the world of broken lifts about 20 years ago. At first, she’d been looking for a 9-to-5 job so that she could raise a family and still have evenings free to spend with her children. Once the kids had grown up, Jo saw more and more of her life being spent on the road, checking into hotels and drifting between pins on the company map.
Jo also told me about her husband, who had been the security guard on the day of a fire at Primark’s colossal Leicestershire warehouse in 2005. We discussed the monotony of his usual days on the job there, and how an episode like that must have been so disconcerting. Whereas, at the Lift Alarms Call Centre, frenzy dials in nonstop. But this, too, brings its own mundanity. Both the security guard and the lift alarms agent rock on the same see-saw: the one that teeters between tedium and terror.
Jo told me that a good half of the calls would actually come here from lifts inside homes across the country; chair lifts attached to stairs for the elderly or disabled, for example. On answering a call, an agent wouldn’t know if they were speaking to somebody in a 40-storey building in the City, on a station platform in Cornwall or a great-grandparent who can’t get downstairs. The common fingerprint on each outstretched hand is distress.
I was picturing the room I was about to walk into as a kind of drop-in town square for the country’s most momentarily worried. By definition, few come to this place in blithe spirits. Which seemed appropriate for a nation that is currently underscored, in so many ways, by the tones of crisis and panic and instability and anxiety. Waiting by the kitchen door, I realised I too had become a little nervous. Or shall we say apprehensive.
“I love these Easter egg mugs,” I said. “They’re a classic aren’t they?”
“Yes, those were the days.”
“Do they not still do them?”
Neither of us knew.
The door to the Operations Room was propped open, so I could already hear the calls in full flow as Jo led me across the corridor. There were three staff on the phones and two spare desks; one for me and one for Leanne, who would be arriving later for an afternoon shift. I sat down, and Jo gestured around the room. “Take it all in. It’s this little room for everywhere.”
With all three agents engaged on a call, I spent a few minutes looking around the room. There’s a certain type of commercial flooring you often find in rooms like this: anti-slip acrylic, usually blue or grey and finished off, for some reason, with flakes of glitter. Who, I wondered, decided to add glitter to the most utilitarian of floors? Which great ironist decided that commercial flooring should sparkle under the glare of strip lighting? Maybe there’s a catalogue that sells a starter pack bundle that includes this glittering flooring and throws in all the other necessary accoutrements for good measure. The white fan and the now off-white blinds. The headsets and hard-plastic phones and the microwave, which was spinning at this point with someone’s minestrone. A microwave that heats food with electromagnetic waves that vibrate nine million times faster than the sound of middle C.
After about five minutes, I got to properly meet the Sunday morning congregation. All three were in their late twenties or early thirties and spoke with a London/Kent borderlands estuary lilt. Kat was introduced as the “newbie”, having joined a few months before. Kat had just been dealing with an argumentative caller when I spoke to her. “She’s asking us things with her home lift that we can’t do, so we’ve passed her on to her local branch. But she keeps calling us.”
I started asking Kat a question about what it’s like to be exposed to all of these very private ordeals. What it’s like to act as the spokesperson for a piece of machinery. Halfway through, though, her phone went off. There were laughs from around the room as she apologised and picked up her headset. “She’s popular today,” said Jo.
In fact, there were a lot of laughs across the board. Much of this seemed to come from Jo’s influence, but a big part of it was also down to Kayleigh, the team’s “senior”. Being the “senior” meant Kayleigh was a kind of team-captain figure who kept the room running whenever Jo wasn’t around. Kayleigh had a totally infectious positivity that the others attributed to her weekend morning tradition of blasting Radio 1 at 6am on the drive to work. When others praised her, she brushed it off. Sarah — the third agent, a serial tea drinker (“We should have our own cow outside, the amount of milky tea we drink.”) and the lucky occupant of the desk by the window — told me about Kayleigh’s career progression over the years in this room and how, when the top role came up, they’d all been rooting for her. “I don’t think I could work for anyone else now I know what it’s like here,” she said.
There was another flurry of calls, but nothing earth-shattering. Just a gentle ripple of panic. Some lifts jolted back to life mid-call, either by divine providence or Sod’s Law. One didn’t, so the passenger was told to keep calm and wait for 40 minutes, by which time an engineer would be on the scene. And then Kayleigh addressed the room: “Does anybody want a break? Make sure you’re getting your breaks.”
She turned to me to explain: “A lunch break or any break, you can’t predict when. In busy times, you can go right through them.”
On one of the walls, above a set of monitors, I noticed a poster with a flock of birds flying by a mountain at sunset emblazoned underneath with the word TEAMWORK. The caption read: “It is a fact, that in the right formation, the lifting power of many wings can achieve twice the distance of any bird flying alone.” I mentioned that I liked the birds poster, and a few months after my visit, I received an email from Stannah’s head office, telling me that the company insignia is a swift, “to represent freedom of movement”. Swifts are such adventurous birds. They live with great brio, spending most of their lives, even through the long nights, in flight.
The first step for an agent taking a call , Kat told me, is to identify the location. A lot of the time, entrapped people are shocked to hear that they’re not speaking to someone in the same building as them. “I’m on Floor 27!” people shout, or “I’m in the lift at the back!” Kat said. “The penny usually drops when I ask them their postcode.”
There were about 10 tabs open on each of Kat’s two monitors: a “health history” of the troubled lift; statistics about wait times and response rates; emails, messages, GIFs and emojis; calendars; referral forms. The core of the team’s computer system was a huge database of engineers that can be searched with a postcode or city name. But Kat said the single most important thing for her, far more essential than any slick technology, is to relay some sense of “fidelity” to the caller. “You have such a short interaction to build up that trust.”
Callers seem to think their predicament is extraordinary when, of course, most calls are essentially the same. This dynamic crops up in lots of life’s fears and I think it’s just another expression of feeling, briefly, a bit alone in the world. “The last thing you want them to feel is that they’re screaming into a void,” Kat said. Especially when they are literally in a void.
There’s a term in art — anamorphosis — for when an image only looks right if you come at it from a certain place. Anamorphosis is the way the team at the Lift Alarms Call Centre can see an image of Britain that is so profoundly true-to-life.
Take a Saturday. Begin around 6am or 7am. This is the worst time to get stuck in a lift, as it’s when the switchboards are jammed with test calls from retail staff checking everything works before opening shop. Then around 8am or 9am, older people wake up and call in with all of the faults that developed Friday evening and overnight. Shoppers soon arrive in town, with children who “push any button they see”. In the late afternoon, restaurants start to stir and it just so happens that the Lift Alarms Call Centre deals with both the dumbwaiters in kitchens and the lifts that bring diners and take them away. Then, as the sun sets, the team follows Saturday night’s “merrymakers” through bars and parties, back to hotels or railway stations for the last train home. The hours that follow bring peace at last.
At the Lift Alarms Call Centre you could follow the tidal rhythms of a British weekend. Each seven or eight minutes brings a different story. Lifts might speed through the interstices, but the Lift Alarms Call Centre spends a little time everywhere.
“We had a callout on the Isle of Skye this weekend,” Kayleigh pointed at the Hebrides on a map of the UK. It was one of those satellite maps that shows Britain from space, where life is articulated by pools of electric light. The team described to me the journey of the engineer who travelled out over the sea to Skye with its rolling hills and rocky sgùrrs. We discussed whether the engineer might have had time for fish and chips while on the island. I imagined a Shipping Forecast of lift faults: “Rough entrapments across Viking, North Utsire. Cables moving effortlessly up and down Cromarty, the Forties and German Bight.”
Skye is part of Stannah’s Glasgow branch, which covers all of Scotland. The company has 11 of these branches across the country, stretching down to Bristol, which covers the whole of south-west England. The Gateshead branch is huge and oversees everything from York to the top of Northumberland. I must have been eight years old before I’d ever been anywhere outside of this area. Across these regions, there are shades of panic in hundreds of accents and thousands of timbres.
And even though I was amazed by the vastness of it all, the team was just blasé. With the awe long worn-off, they instead tended towards that most patient of emotions: humour. There was the time a cat urinated on to a lift’s power box, which started sparking and fizzing. Or the story of another cat whose tail got stuck in the stair rail of a home chair lift.
Sarah told the one about how she “had a dog the other week”, also caught in a lift mechanism. “The customer kept saying, ‘He’s a big dog. He’s fine, but the lift isn’t!’” We agreed, as Sarah had with the caller at the time, that this was far preferable to the counterfactual.
This is a place where people are serious about serious situations but so many of the calls seemed to come with a punchline. Take the phonetic alphabet, for example, which is vital for the operations of the Lift Alarms Call Centre. Like all serious things, there’s a camp to the phonetic alphabet, with its Romeos and Juliets, whiskeys, tangos and bravos. In the Operations Room, there was an endless roll call of sierras, Charlies, deltas, hotels. The team was keen to show me the funny side. The nation’s butcherings and improvisations. More often than you’d think, I was told, they’d get B for banana, Q for cucumber and E for X-ray.
“It’s a bit rude,” said Jo. “They were trying to say F for foxtrot, but they accidentally said F for sexpot. I can see how they confused it but it was one of those really embarrassing moments.”
I couldn’t escape the sense that the jokes in the Lift Alarms Call Centre were more than just for laughs. Sometimes this place felt like a mountain climbers’ basecamp or a ship far out at sea. There was talk of long night shifts in deep Kentish winters with the Oodies, snoods, Horlicks and slippers needed to make them bearable. I’d initially thought Jo’s advice to bring my sense of humour was phatic (as if she was assuring me, it’s not all doom and gloom! ). I was now realising that her comment had actually been a sort of workplace safety assessment against occupational hazards. Jo had known that on the front line, where people shout and scream down the phone and imagine themselves alone or trapped or plummeting to the ground, good humour is PPE. It’s what makes a fortress out of this shed.
Conversations tended to ebb and flow. Incoming calls meant that topics were often derailed and rotated. Within the small team there were duos, trios and groups within groups, all interweaving. Each permutation was a unique friendship or dynamic in itself with its own comic sensibility.
There was one thing that they all had in common, Kayleigh told me. “We’re all mums.”
“All of you?” I looked around. Yes, every one. Their other colleagues in the rota too.
“We choose these strange hours. We all do school runs or childcare during the week,” Kayleigh said. “It means we get to spend time with our children Monday to Friday, then we put them to bed or pass them to a partner who’s off work at the weekend.”
They told me how work could be revitalising, a half-respite from everyday family responsibilities; how it could be a place to spend quality time with dear friends. I said that it might be surprising for people to think of work in this way. Especially weekend work. Weekends being those great liminal zones of dreaming and waiting, shindigs and hangovers, TGIF and Sunday blues.
“This is our weekend!” Kayleigh said. “And we’ve always got a week’s worth of news to catch up with each other about. There’s always someone who’s got something to say.”
To ride a lift is to outsmart time , space and gravity. Lifts elide height into smoothness and evaporate physical effort at the touch of a button. They are high modernism, a song for the centuries when engineering became an unfussy religion. In offices and shops, they conserve our energy to be better spent on labour and consumption. In blocks of flats, they help us to live efficiently. Height can showboat like the Burj Khalifa or it can be disregarded like Grenfell Tower. Height, in the world today, speaks of both ostentatiousness and vulnerability. So do lifts, and lifts make all of it possible.
“The thunder’s coming soon,” said Jo, looking out the window on to the car park.
The clouds being grey and heavy, I could believe it. But I’d misunderstood. “The Thunder is what we call Leanne,” Jo said. “She’ll be coming for the afternoon soon.”
We carried on with the weather conversation nonetheless. Weather chat is often looked down on as shallow. I couldn’t disagree more. We spoke about the previous summer’s brutal days in August, where the temperature went above 40C for the first time on record in the UK. That “forty-degree day” had a mythic status. It was the drought that went around it and the politics, too. The images of reservoirs drying, cars fuming, fields scorching. Indeed, when Boris Johnson resigned at the end of that summer, he blamed England’s “unbearable” weather for his downfall.
“In that heat, everything in the lifts broke down. The hydraulic units in motor rooms broke, we got oil clogs,” said Jo. There had been a worry about frozen foods in warehouse lifts and how much it all might have cost the company if produce was ruined. Likewise, with bullion lifts in banks.
“Who knows what the weather will be this year?” I said.
“It doesn’t look like it’ll be the same, does it. But who knows? We’ve had all kinds of records and news events in our time here,” Jo said. “We really should have a TV for updates.” She listed some examples. “We’ve been through a whole history of elections, invasions, bomb alerts and terrorism, famous people dying. Pandemics, of course.”
I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between these big-ticket crises and the small, everyday crises that dial in here constantly. But I wanted to lighten the mood, and it was the day of the Wimbledon final, so I suggested that her hypothetical TV could’ve been useful for that as well. “We’d get no work done!” Jo said, joking. “Don’t suggest it or this lot will get ideas!”
The team agreed having a TV in the Lift Alarms Call Centre just couldn’t work. There’s never enough uninterrupted time. And even though the calls are sometimes slow during the nights, this is when the team needs to be able to concentrate most, because it’s far harder to calm people down when the lifts they’re stuck in are dark and quiet. There’s something primordial about the night that intensifies panic. “It’s not really a shock if callers get aggressive,” said Jo. “We get people who are afraid of fires or start imagining things that could go wrong.”
Sarah told me about one caller who kept asking, “Why don’t you stick your blues and twos on?”
“A lot of callers feel like we should be a fourth emergency service,” Sarah said. “Darren our engineer said he could stick his head out of his van window and shout ‘Nee-naw nee-naw’ if that’d reassure them.”
The Thunder rolled in. Leanne, a former jewellery salesperson, came armed with a Battenberg cake for the team. A full house now assembled, I asked the question I was most curious about: had working here changed the way they used lifts themselves?
For some reason, this question got the biggest laugh of the morning.
Kayleigh explained why: “I don’t think a single one of us uses lifts at all, do we?”
“No, I’m too scared,” said Jo. “We’re all too scared aren’t we?”
Sarah said she would usually count the number of people getting into a lift and if there were more than a handful of passengers, wait for the next one. Jo said she would rather take the stairs anyway.
One could argue that, per journey, lifts are the safest mode of transport, and so the least worthy of all this fear. Jo mentioned an engineer called Elisha Otis, who we can thank. In 1853, he built an open-sided elevator for the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations and performed a publicity stunt in front of a clamouring New York crowd. He stood inside the lift as an assistant cut the hoist cord with a huge pair of shears. When the car stayed put and didn’t plunge down the shaft, the crowd was amazed. Jo said, “Lifts never just fall through the floors. Even so, I still don’t use them.”
I totally empathise, because in any second at this place, the terrifying can become tedious and the everyday can become absolutely terrifying. Kat answered a call and I could hear the voice on the other end just screaming.
“Hello. You’re stuck in there? Are you OK? Are you all right?”
More indecipherable screaming.
“I’m sorry I can’t hear you very well, can you say that again for me?”
There but for the grace of God go I.
“I can’t hear you very well. Can you tell me where you are?”
Then the screaming just stopped.
“Oh, it just opened,” Kat said. “No problem,” she told the person on the other end. “Thank you.”
Anxiety being whatever it is, this really did seem like a place where every “what if” or “what about” had a totally straightforward answer. While Kat typed some notes from the call, Sarah told me how even the engineers themselves often get stuck in lifts while fixing them, without so much as raising an eyebrow. “They try to say it casually, thinking I won’t notice, going ‘Oh can you just add so-and-so to this job, just to help me.’ And I think: You plum! What are you like!”
But let’s say an elderly person got stuck upstairs. How would they let an engineer in? I could accept that lifts might not crash and burn, but surely there must be some peril left in the world of the Lift Alarms Call Centre?
“Well we usually just have them throw the keys out the window,” Jo answered. Or a lot of them say, “‘Oh it’s okay, I don’t lock my front door!’ I don’t know where they live, but I’d like to live there.”
Kayleigh went even further, saying that lift auto-dialler buttons can often be a lifeline for all kinds of non-lift problems: “There have been times where older people are stuck upstairs and need an ambulance, and they don’t have a phone but they can reach us.”
She was pointing to another great crisis of our times. Loneliness and isolation in old age . “Even if we know a fault could be sorted in five minutes,” Sarah said, “sometimes we maybe talk them through it slowly and speak to them for 20. Especially if it seems like we could be the only ones they speak to all day.” A screen on the wall displays average queueing times so the team always knows what time they can afford. Kayleigh told me how “you can definitely get a lot of emotions coming out. People saying, ‘Nobody cares for me, nobody will come and help me.’ I think they forget they’re talking to us sometimes.”
I’m sure dread predates us and will outlast us all. But it is a fact that the structural framework within which we all live has come to feel so precarious and that much of the joie de vivre has been wrested from civic life. First, the public libraries and provincial bus services began to disappear, then state school sport and music. Now pubs and fish and chip shops can’t afford to stay open, the rivers are full of raw sewage, nurses pay to park at hospitals, high streets are empty, schools have CEOs, culture wars appear online and end up in manifestos and people can’t get appointments with their GP. Beyond the body politic, my morning spent eavesdropping on the calls of the fearful convinced me that we should also be worried about the psyche politic. How do people, en masse, feel?
Sarah told me about the day an engineer called Graham dropped in to visit. “He really liked seeing what the calls team does, but he also showed us clips of what engineers have to deal with. Needles, knives, problems with safety. Heavy, big machines. Frail people.” Meanwhile, Kat had once had the opportunity to go on a site visit, where engineers had been absolutely amazed to hear about a typical shift in the office, during which an agent could easily take over 140 calls. These small moments of rapport across the divide transformed the communication between the departments. Perhaps we can learn something from that.
And though it was barely summer, there was already talk of the Christmas Day shift. After all, lifts don’t stop getting faulty for the nativity. For hospitals, care homes, hotels and their lifts, every day is an ordinary working day. I heard how it can be deeply satisfying to be part of the team who rescues so many Christmases all over the country, even if that means microwaved roast potatoes in that little shed in Dartford. Had Mary and Joseph been required to take the M25 for Quirinius’ census, they might just have ended up there.
Before I left, Jo suggested that I sit for five minutes more and get a final impression of this place as it truly is, every Sunday, all of the time. “Maybe it’ll be the case that something amazing happens,” she said.
So Jo sat on a filing cabinet while the team took calls, and I was on a seat close to the door where I could take in the whole room. That soundscape again, of addresses, timings, floor numbers, names, fears and reconciliations. Like the background radiation that fills the cosmos as a result of the Big Bang, there was a neutrality of pitch, tone and rhythm to it.
Nothing immense happened, so I took my mug back through to the kitchen, rinsed it and let it drain by the sink. There was no opportunity for a proper goodbye, no moment when all of the staff were off the phones at once. I left them there, where the country’s panic would be well received all the way through to Monday morning.
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