My name is Cordelia and I'm really bored

If you’re going to work on a chat line for a dare, and they tell you to change your name and persona every hour, so as to make it sound more authentic – as if you’re not really being paid; like you really were one of the hundreds of bored housewives the ads go on about, just waiting for a call, cue the knowing/sultry/suggestive look on the naked woman in the photograph, designed to get callers to ring the hideously expensive number - it would be really cruel to choose your friends’ names wouldn’t it?

The thing is, I had to do something to alleviate the boredom, and there wasn’t much scope. So I was Cordelia, and Carla, and Fiona and many other good friends, and that made me laugh a little. Anyway, they never found out, so it wasn’t that bad. It’s not like I used their surnames. The person who’d dared me chickened out altogether; she never did one single call, so of course, I used her name the most.

On the face of it, it’s a good way to earn a bit of money if you’re stuck at home, which I was at the time, in the middle of nowhere. It was that, or English teaching, and you have to do lesson preparation for teaching, and look a certain way – business-like, which is a real pain in the arse. I could keep my jeans on with the chat line. The school was also an 18-mile drive, which would have taken up a lot of time and money.

Apart from the drive, and the preparation, and the clothes, there’s not all that much difference between the two. For both, you need to be able to do roleplay – it’s a very important part of both jobs. As an English teacher you invent situations using the past tense, or you pretend to be new in town, asking for directions, or at a party, introducing yourself.

As a chat line worker, you have to convince the man on the other end of the line that it’s so hot you have taken off all your clothes, and the only thought in your head after doing that, naturally, was to call a chat line to see if there was anyone who wanted to hear all about it.

When you’re teaching, the aim is to make the students talk as much as possible, so they get lots of practice with the language. I’d been very good at that; lots of open-ended questions. Never ask anything that can be answered with a yes or no. It’s easy once you’ve done it a few times. On a chat line, in the same way, you have to spin out the call – the company had a star chart for the person who got the longest average time out of the callers. The longer they stay the more they pay.

That part was hard; the ones who stayed longest were the men who were drunk enough to try to get my phone number – they thought I really was Cordelia, the 22 year old student of philosophy, who was bored and had taken all her clothes off, and enjoyed listening to men masturbating. I was always exhausted after those phone calls; It’s very hard to tell someone to fuck off, but at the same time keep them on the line. I don’t think I ever quite got the hang of it.

It turned out to be less interesting than I’d thought in the end. I’d had friends who’d been escorts in London and they’d always told me that you could sometimes have a decent conversation in between conning people into buying hideously expensive bottles of not champagne. Things must have changed though – by the time I did the chat line thing, all those people seemed to have disappeared, and the only ones I ever spoke to were disappointingly uninterested in chatting.

I got the sack in the end. No one ever said anything; I just received my p45 in the post one day. When I started, the supervisor said they listened in sometimes, to make sure you were doing what you were meant to be doing, and I think they might have listened in the time I was at a cottage in the middle of nowhere with a really patchy signal.

You had to lean halfway out of a window to be able to talk, and I was doing that, and saying the old “it’s so hot I’ve taken all my clothes off, and now I’m just lying here wearing nothing at all and I’m so bored”, when a woman in a Barbour coat walked by with two dogs, and gave me a look, so I started laughing and then I couldn’t stop, and it all went downhill from there. Maybe they were listening, or maybe he complained or something, who knows?

I was quite pleased not to have to do it any more. I always felt uncomfortable about how much money they were spending, and sometimes when one of them was on for a long time, I wondered about saying “do you realise how much this is costing you?” I definitely won the dare though. I was glad about that.