Crack Monkey goes to rehab

I realised that I had become a crack monkey precisely at 9.40am, Saturday outside the O2 shop on Oxford Street. Alone and lost with the street cleaners  and women with empty suitcases ready to be filled with South East Asian sweat. My phone broke. All that pounding excitedly on twitter over the last two weeks and the poor mite experienced early on-set dementia (yes I realise that’s a bit saucy but I’m Freudian and you literally do not want to know how my mind goes about smart phones). The final straw was Friday night when it stopped receiving calls and re-programmed my ring tone to oscillate between Duran Duran’s Save a Prayer and Britney’s Toxic.Twenty minutes waiting for the shop to open I sweat and rehearse my story, defeated at the prospect of explaining my credit rating to a 16 year old boy with half a million followers on twitter. Having explained my predicament to said young man the phone was sent off for emergency care, and visible despair sets in. Young man looks into my saucer eyes and gently says “it’ll be liberating Elizabeth”. At which point I realised that the kids working in phone shops are in fact the high street therapists that we in mental health have only so far only dreamed of.  Lite n Deep. 24 hours in rehab and I’m struck by the silence. What I crave isn’t so much the hilarious sillies and meanies but the sound of a voice that isn’t my own banging on about how to get people to ‘like’ me. Turns out the new school phones still deliver the old school stuff that matters. Contact with other people. If you’re missing the sound of a friendly voice dive into our Surviving Work Library and listen to how the experts do it www.survivingwork.org Download the PDF hereListen to the podcast here