David likes to say, 'Sometimes I try to remember what it was like. When the world was young. Before we had them.' He uses this superior voice which annoys me. On the other hand, I know what he means.

'It's my life.'

That's what she said.

Ranting down the line at me.

My life.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

The night we met, David said, 'Why would you want to carry a phone around with you?' Which'll tell you how long we've been together. I said, 'Because that's the way a phone was always supposed to be, the way Alexander Graham Bell would have wanted it.' I said, ' Not stuck on a wall or at the end of a wire but there in your back pocket when you need it.'

In your back pocket.

Ha.

There's the rub, as David would say.

(He's a big one for quotes is David.)

Because as likely as not it'll be your back pocket your phone disappears from. Lifted when you're dancing. Or just fallen out on the floor and lost forever in the sea of feet. Or there again maybe it'll be another pocket, in your jacket, say, thrown over a bar stool or hung up out of sight in what you previously would have sworn was the best restaurant. Or in your handbag left unattended. Or maybe you went for broke, left the phone on the bar top while you went off to chat up the man or the woman of your dreams. Whatever, chances are that when you reach for it to ring the taxi, and it's not there, and you ring me instead, there'll be that note of surprise in your voice that it could have happened. That someone stole it.

It's my life...

Nothing surprises you anymore when you work the night shift.

Once a man called me with the blood still pouring down his arm from the robbery. I said, 'So you're at the hospital now?' He said, 'No, I called you first. I'm holding the wound together with my fingers.'

Heavy breathing during a tariff enquiry? Oh yeah. We get that. Distraught wives demanding to be told the identity of the mobile number that's tripled the phone bill.

'I'll give you anything.. anything..' one said to me, and I could hear the tears pouring down her face.

When I told her I couldn't help her voice just went tired and defeated. She said, 'He's at it again,' and somehow that was the worst of it.

We're the Samaritans here. Lonely lorry drivers, old people with no-one to talk to.

Once Gerry who sits next to me took this call from an old woman. The voice was frail and quavery. She said she was too poor to put the heating on. She said, 'I'm getting cold... cold...colder...'

Afterwards, in the fag break Gerry says, 'You know, sometimes you get the feeling there's this big tide of loneliness out there,' and she's looking out of the window into the darkness, into the almost empty car park, and all the blacked out office blocks beyond, and suddenly I seem to see it, that great tide of loneliness and unhappiness lapping around life at the edges.

Like tonight.

Right from the start I know it's more than a lost phone. (You have to be part psychiatrist in this job. I tried to tell that to David once but he wasn't interested).

I'm playing it careful because of this, because of that edge I hear in her voice. I'm being extra sympathetic, trying to calm her, trying to tell her what we can do, what we can't do, and not because of some smarmy good practice, but because that's what you have to do, because you have to be sympathetic, and this because you never know when a simple call about a lost phone is going to end with someone screaming down the line at you. It's my Life.

Which of course is exactly what happened.

When the call dropped just after she'd yelled it, I figured she must have rung off. But then half a minute later she's back on, and when Gerry puts her through she's still yelling. She's calling me all the names under the sun and I can't quite figure out why. And then she says it, and I understand because the words come out like a howl, spiralling up straight from her heart.

She says, 'You hung up on me.'

And all the vicious spitting fury is gone in one, and instead now she's sobbing, sort of crooning the words. She says, 'Everyone hangs up on me. All of my life. Everyone has hung up on me.' And then there's this silence so that the words come softly out of the middle of it.

She says, 'D'ya ever feel like Life has hung up on you?'

We parted friends. I guess you could say that. I told her.' I didn't hang up. We don't do hanging up here. 'I said, 'The call dropped that's all. I thought you'd rung off.'

By the time we'd done the business, the insurance, all that stuff, she was apologising. She said, 'You got a nice voice,' and I could hear the wistfulness in her own. She said, 'I don't suppose you'd fancy...' and I just laughed. I said, 'Tell you the truth, I'm six hundred miles away.' I didn't tell her the other truth. I thought, 'Why bother?'

I phoned David in the break. His voice was sleepy at first and after that angry. But I didn't care.

I said, 'David. We need to talk.'

I said, 'Don't even think of hanging up on me David.'