The housing worker diaries: Part 1, Chapter 1 — The Interview
How I entered the profession and my daily struggle with boundaries in a job where empathy is key.
I didn’t realise I was in a job interview. I was in jeans. Not even my best pair straight from the wash; they had the three-day sag around the bum and a faint oil stain on the thigh from a recent encounter with a fried egg sandwich. I’d responded to an email from the homeless charity I’d been volunteering for. They had sent a call-out for Locum Workers to cover shifts in some of their hostels.
Side note: Locums are the Supply Teachers of the support work world. Ready to step in and fill the shoes of permanent staff when they are off sick or on leave.
It was casual, ad hoc work and I could do with the extra cash. I was a freelance musician performing at weddings, teaching workshops in schools and doing the odd club gig here and there. I’d been running a few music classes for the charity as my way of ‘giving back’, although seeing as my self-employed salary was averaging twelve grand a year, no one was expecting me to give back anything. Who did I think I was? Billy Bragg?
I arrived at the hostel 10 minutes late. But I wasn’t flustered because I was just coming in for a ‘chat’.
‘Take a seat and we’ll be with you shortly. Can I get you a glass of water?’
‘No thanks’
‘The interview will take around forty-five minutes to an hour.’
Shit.
I desperately wanted to explain that I didn’t know it was a ‘proper interview’ and that’s why I wasn’t dressed in my usual interview attire (a black skirt suit borrowed from my sister) but that would make a terrible first impression. Instead I chose to go along with it and was quietly reassured when the manager arrived in reception with gold converse and purple hair. I would have felt sillier in my skirt suit. Faux pas averted.
Having evaded dress code ridicule, I settled into my chair in the interview room/stationary cupboard, ready to put into action all the soft skills I’d been nurturing for the last five years in place of a proper job. ‘Thinking on my feet’, ‘adaptability’, ‘time management’. OK, not time management.
‘Let’s get started. So you’re on shift in the hostel when one of the residents comes to you having an asthma attack. At the same time, you see out of the window that a man has been stabbed in the street. What do you do first?’
I’m not exaggerating to say that I ummed and ahhed for about 30 seconds, which in ‘interview time’, is about an hour. Having never worked in the support sector, I had no idea what the ‘right’ answer was in the context of the care profession. I felt like I was in the interviewing episode of The Apprentice when they grill the candidates unnecessarily harshly to watch them buckle under pressure in the name of viewing figures. Needless to say, I would have been eliminated on the spot.
Eventually I said,
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’
After such a long pause, that was pretty evident already. I could have taken a stab at it (no pun intended) but I’d rather appear ignorant than unsympathetic to those who can’t breathe.
‘Your responsibility is always to the residents in the hostel first and foremost. You would tend to the man with asthma first.’
I had so many questions. What if the person being stabbed lived at the hostel as well? Why was I looking out the window when someone had just come into my office having an asthma attack? What does ‘tend to’ actually mean? Because I’m picturing mopping someone’s brow with a wet flannel. Where are the flannels kept?
This first interview question is a really good analogy for what my first couple of years working in the hostels felt like. On a daily basis I’d be faced with what felt like insurmountable situations that had no clear solution.
‘Someone came into my room when I was out and stole all my money! That’s my money for the month and its gone! I have nothing for food, cigs, nothing! What am I meant to do? Can you lend me a fiver? Just until I get my benefits.’
I’d spend so much time trying to unpack what happened, consoling, even considering dipping into my own bank account to help clients out. (Although if they saw the state of my bank account, they might have been slipping fivers into my pocket like Mum used to do.) It was exhausting. Whatever energy the client was giving out, I would take it on; If I saw someone crying, a lump rose in my throat. If they told me of an injustice, I was vicariously enraged. If someone came to me injured… well, I’d just gaze out the window to see if any crimes were happening.
Then someone with some training and experience would swoop in and handle it with the calm of a cat on a warm patio.
‘Oh Mark. Would you like us the check the CCTV?’
‘No, I know who did it! I need some money.’
‘We can print off a foodbank voucher for you? There’s also some food in the donations room you can have.’
‘Nah don’t bother. You don’t wanna help me.’
I would be left wondering why I couldn’t have handled it myself. I considered myself to be reasonably intelligent, caring and a good ‘problem solver’. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this work? I was in awe of the support workers who surrounded me. They would apply logic, reason and a healthy amount of empathy to the situation without once considering dipping into their own bank accounts. How did they do it? Would there ever be a time when I’d get through a shift without my neck turning red and needing to escape to the disabled loo to recoup.
Although I didn’t realise it at the time, there was only one thing standing in the way of me being able to manage complex situations and maintaining boundaries: training and practice.
Like most things in my life, I’ve done them the hard way. I came to support work with no formal training. For the first few years I learned on the job by observing competent people who had studied psychology or trained in social work or the like. I’d trained in the Performing Arts so all I was equipped with was the mantra ‘the show must go on!’ Which actually did come in very handy, particularly at Breakfast Club when all the sugar and milk would regularly get stolen and I’d have to improvise.
‘Well we shouldn’t be having sugar in our tea anyway and milk is actually bad for humans because we can’t digest it very well. So who wants some dry Weetabix?!’
After the interview I was confident I would never work as a locum. I did my first shift in a hostel the following week. I’m not sure what they saw in me, perhaps I came across as ‘willing to learn’ or perhaps I just came across as… available. Either way, I’m glad I turned up that day.
Having boundaries at work still doesn’t come naturally to me. I constantly question my practice and whether I’m being flexible enough in my approach in order to meet the needs of my clients. It stems partly from having a people-pleaser personality (which many in caring professions do) and partly from an aversion to policy and process. For me, applying a rigid process when it comes to human suffering feels counter-intuitive. However, I wouldn’t be able to continue to do the work if I didn’t now have a methodology I can lean on when things get chaotic.
The paradox of the caring professions — whether that be nursing, social work or teaching — is that the people who should be doing the work, because of their capacity for empathy, are those most prone to burnout. We must work hard to strengthen the framework of our practice, while still maintaining our humanity. In that sense, support work is very much like making a decent cup of tea. The tea bag and hot water are a must, but a dash of milk and sugar makes it so much better. Although, as I well know, that can be easier said than done.
Originally published at https://tiredhousingworker.com on August 31, 2020.
