People ask me what's the weirdest thing about the job and honestly it's how boring most of it is.
Not in a bad way. I just mean most bookings are dead normal. Guy comes. You do what you've agreed. He goes. You have a brew. That's it. That's most of them.
The stories you hear are the rare ones. There's a selection thing going on and I reckon most girls who write about it make it sound more dramatic than it is because the boring version isn't much of a story. But I'd rather you know what it's actually like day to day.
The hardest part for me isn't the work itself. It's the admin. Responding to messages, vetting people, cancellations, the ghost bookings. Some weeks it feels like half my working hours are just messages from people who were never going to book anyway.
I've started being a lot more direct about it. If someone's been messaging three days and hasn't committed to a time, I just ask straight: are we booking or not? Most of them book. Some of them disappear. Either is fine, I just need to know.
Four years in. I make more than I did at the call centre and I work fewer hours and nobody shouts at me down a phone anymore. On that basis alone I'd say it's an improvement. The call centre was proper grim.