My first job – at a nut house

Before I gave up on the whole “work” thing (to concentrate on my sky-rocketing writing career), I, like everyone who isn’t rich, had several really crappy jobs. My first proper one was at a residential psychiatric hospital as a support worker and “sleep-in” – which basically means you help put the patients to bed and stay there overnight in case they start eating each other. That they would hire an 18-year-old to do this job really says a lot about state mental heath care, but I desperately needed money for drugs and shoes or whatever stupid shit I was into.

I very rarely told anyone I was working there. The few people I did tell were friends working at Gap or H&M who thought it was an hilarious ironic novelty. I never had the heart to tell them any differently.

The hospital itself was fairly grim because they refused to spend money on cleaners, and the staff had to do it in shifts. There was a dining room, a lounge and three floors of patients who all needed varying levels of care.

One of the patients was called John. John lived on the first floor. He was about 300lbs and often used to walk around naked. He had a lazy eye and would sometimes try to masturbate at the dinner table. John was the reason we would sometimes have to lock ourselves in a room to avoid death. Once I caught him stealing food from the kitchen and he called me a devil whore and threw a ceramic bowl at my head. I got a five-minute cigarette break out of it though, so huzzah for me.

We also had a compulsive liar I’ll call Jeremy. I didn’t know this though because none of the staff bothered to fill me in on the mental health histories of any of the patients, so I had to figure this out through trial and error. Jeremy’s lies would range from insisting he hadn’t been at dinner and should therefore have a tray brought to his room (which I fell for, a few times) to actually trying to convince me he was Shakespeare (which is when I got suss). Jeremy was a really nice guy apart from this. We used to watch EastEnders together and then spend ages discussing each episode.

On my third week, I got punched in the head by a patient who was enraged that I had forgotten to knock three times on the wall by his room as I walked by. For that, I got a ten-minute cigarette break and half an hour doing administrative duties in the office. By this time, I was so fucking sick of that job that I would have welcomed the opportunity to get my ass kicked all over the place just to get a day or two off.

I quit because the staff were unbearably corrupt (as I left, they were under inspection for the fourth time in a year) and because it was slowly killing my soul, piece by piece. I have lots more stories, including the time I caught a patient eating his own faeces, and the time John cornered me in his room and tried to strangle me, but that should the gist of my first job.