Geoff

Fresh out of university, I did what fresh graduates are generally expected to do.

I got a job.

I ended up working for an NHS Informatics team in Manchester, right at the beginning of the rollout of some enormous new national computer systems. Lorenzo. Choose and Book. The NHS Spine. A billion-pound attempt to drag NHS patient information and access into a more connected digital world.

My tiny part in this enormous machine was access cards.

I travelled around Greater Manchester interviewing doctors, nurses and other NHS staff to establish exactly what level of access they needed to do their jobs. Patient records, clinical systems, different permissions depending on their role.

And I did all this driving around in the Grande Rouge. My tiny red hand-me-down car that I’d bought from my brother for fifty quid. The one with the choke.

Every morning I’d coax the Grande Rouge into life, pull the choke out, wait for the engine to decide whether it was prepared to participate in the day, and then set off around Greater Manchester visiting GP surgeries and hospitals.

I’d sit down opposite people considerably more qualified than me, work out what they needed access to, then drive back into Manchester to our main hub near Piccadilly station and create their Lorenzo cards.

Looking back, it was quite a lot of responsibility to give a bunch of people who had only just left university.

And it was brilliant.

I don’t think I’ve had a job since that suited my brain quite as well.

At the time, of course, I didn’t know I had ADHD.

I just knew I liked being trusted.

I liked being given something to do and being allowed to work out how to do it.

I organised my own appointments.

Planned my own routes.

Drove myself around Manchester.

Met completely different people every day.

Came back to the office.

Made the cards.

Nobody hovered over me asking what I was doing every fifteen minutes.

There was movement, novelty, responsibility and autonomy.

Basically, ADHD heaven.

I’ve realised since that I really don’t like being micromanaged. Give me responsibility and I’ll probably take on more than you’ve asked for. Stand over my shoulder checking every tiny thing I do and some fundamental part of my personality begins trying to escape through a window.

This job gave me space.

And I worked hard because of it.

It also gave me something else, although I didn’t realise at the time how important it would become.

Some of the people I interviewed worked in sexual health.

Doctors.

Nurses.

People working in a part of medicine that I found completely fascinating.

I remember sitting with them, asking what they needed access to, hearing little glimpses of the kind of work they did, and thinking:

I could do something like this.

Not the IT bit.

The sexual health bit.

I found the whole subject fascinating.

The conversations people had to have.

The intimacy of it.

The psychology.

The bodies.

The relationships.

The things people don’t always know how to talk about.

Somewhere during those appointments, a little idea lodged itself in my head that perhaps one day I might become a sex therapist, or work in sexual health in some way.

I had no idea then where that thought would eventually take me.

It was just one of those tiny thoughts you have in your twenties and carry around without knowing whether it means anything.

But it stayed.

The office itself was also full of characters.

There was Adrian.

Adrian was, I think, one of the most handsome men I had ever seen in real life.

Not television handsome.

Actually standing-three-feet-away-from-you handsome.

He would quite often come over and chat to me and I’d be trying to participate normally in the conversation while another part of my brain was simply thinking:

Wow.

You were really blessed with looks.

There was Michelle.

Tiny. Feisty. A complete pocket rocket.

Michelle had a boyfriend she’d been with since they were incredibly young, maybe fourteen or fifteen, and looking at the two of them you couldn’t immediately work out how the pairing had happened at all.

They seemed completely different.

But underneath it there was obviously this enormous amount of history and affection. They’d grown up together. They knew each other in that way people sometimes do when they’ve shared half their lives before the rest of us have even worked out who we are.

And then there was Steph.

Steph had been in Hollyoaks in a previous life.

She had stepped away from acting, somehow ended up working with us in NHS Informatics, and later went back to acting again.

And she was brilliant.

Absolutely salt of the earth.

Funny without trying to be funny.

Fascinating.

One of those people who could have me in stitches during an otherwise completely ordinary working day.

The office itself had another slightly surreal connection to NHS history.

Some of the filing cabinets we worked with had actually been used during the trial of Dr Harold Shipman.

They were just there.

Filing cabinets.

Ordinary pieces of office furniture being opened and closed while we got on with our jobs.

Except they’d previously held paperwork connected to one of the most notorious criminal cases in British history.

I remember finding that fascinating.

There was something strange about an object carrying that kind of history and then simply returning to being furniture.

We were all roughly the same age, all finding our feet in proper grown-up employment, and the office had that particular atmosphere you get when a group of young people spend far too many hours together.

There was always something going on.

Across the corridor were the proper Informatics team, mostly blokes, and I’d go running with some of them on my lunch break.

We’d run around Ancoats.

Actual running.

At lunchtime.

I realise this now sounds like I’m describing somebody else entirely, but I really did.

It was probably the fittest I have ever been.

The building also had the strangest shower arrangement imaginable.

There were these shower cubicles sitting inside what looked like otherwise unused office space. They were basically like Portaloo showers that somebody had accidentally installed in the middle of a corporate building.

You’d go out running through Manchester, come back sweaty and exhausted and then disappear into this random little cubicle and have a lovely hot shower in the middle of the working day.

It was glorious.

Then I’d go back to making NHS access cards.

My car, meanwhile, spent every day parked in an enormous car park behind Piccadilly station.

The car park was well known locally for prostitution.

This was simply where I parked.

The Grande Rouge and I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

And twice, while I worked there, somebody broke into it.

Twice.

They stole the radio.

They smashed the window.

On one occasion it was winter, and I came back after work to find the passenger window shattered, broken glass all over the seat and a freezing Manchester evening waiting for me.

So I drove all the way home to Radcliffe with no passenger window.

Just an open hole where the window had been.

Freezing air blasting through the car.

Glass still scattered across the passenger seat.

My little fifty-pound Grande Rouge rumbling along with its choke and one less window, carrying me home.

It wasn’t glamorous.

But I loved that job.

And then, one ordinary day in the office, we were going through a pile of Lorenzo cards.

These were obviously real people.

Real NHS staff.

Proper professionals doing important jobs.

But we were also in our early twenties.

So occasionally a name would appear and any professionalism we possessed would evaporate.

There was a woman called Rosie Dick.

That was enough to start us.

Then came:

Dr Rodger Maffat.

Rodger Maffat.

Rodger-my-fat.

We were gone.

Completely gone.

The office had reached that dangerous stage of laughter where everything becomes funny.

And then I picked up another card.

I looked down at it.

And immediately started laughing.

“Oh my God.”

Everyone looked over.

“Look at this.”

I could barely get the words out.

“This bloke’s called…”

I looked again.

“GEE-OFF.”

Silence.

And then absolute carnage.

The entire office erupted.

People were doubled over.

I had absolutely no idea why.

“What?”

More laughing.

“What?!”

Eventually somebody managed to speak.

“Fran.”

Pause.

“It’s Geoff.”

Jeff.

Geoff.

The perfectly normal man’s name.

Geoff.

Except I had apparently reached adulthood without ever properly registering that G-E-O-F-F was pronounced Jeff.

As far as my dyslexic brain was concerned, that was clearly a man called:

Gee-off.

And frankly, even now, I maintain I had some grounds for confusion.

English spelling is ridiculous.

Why does GEO suddenly become JE?

Where did the J come from?

What exactly is the O contributing?

Who agreed to this?

But while everybody else had apparently received this information somewhere during childhood, I had completely missed it.

There was no quiet moment where I got to discover this privately either.

No opportunity to think:

Oh. Geoff. Interesting.

And silently update the filing cabinet in my brain.

No.

I had confidently announced to an entire office that some completely ordinary NHS employee had the funniest name I had ever seen.

I was mortified.

But also genuinely bewildered.

And that’s one of the peculiar things about dyslexia.

It isn’t necessarily that you can’t read.

It isn’t that every complicated word becomes impossible.

I’ve always been able to read plenty of difficult words.

Sometimes it’s the tiny, ordinary ones that trip you up.

A word everybody else appears to have absorbed without conscious effort can remain completely unconnected in your brain until the day you meet it face-to-face.

For years, apparently, Jeff and Geoff had existed as two completely separate things in my head.

Jeff was a man.

Geoff was Gee-off.

Perfectly reasonable.

Unfortunately, my relationship with the NHS Informatics team eventually came to an equally memorable end.

Our manager was called Rob.

Rob and I didn’t particularly gel.

At the time I simply thought he was difficult.

Looking back now, knowing considerably more about neurodiversity than I did then, I actually wonder whether Rob might have been neurodivergent himself.

There was something very rigid about the way he operated.

And there was something very not-rigid about the way I did.

Which was eventually going to become a problem.

One day, I was late.

One of Rob’s managers had apparently asked him where I was and he hadn’t known.

He cornered me in the corridor.

I don’t remember every word of the conversation, but I remember the sentence that mattered.

“You’ve made me look like a dick.”

I was already annoyed.

And instead of doing what a sensible employee might have done — apologising, explaining myself, perhaps nodding thoughtfully and moving on with my day — I snapped back:

“No, Rob. What you do makes you look like a dickhead.”

I added the head.

I shouldn’t have added the head.

There are moments in life where you hear your own mouth finish a sentence and some wiser version of you, approximately half a second behind, thinks:

Ah.

That may have been a mistake.

Rob fired me on the spot.

Hand in your ID badge.

Job gone.

And I was furious.

Not because I didn’t understand why I’d been fired.

I did.

I’d called my manager a dickhead in a corridor.

There aren’t many HR departments that are going to struggle with that one.

But I was twenty-something, angry, embarrassed and completely convinced that the injustice of the entire situation needed immediately broadcasting to the building.

I went back into the office to collect my things.

Michelle, my tiny pocket rocket of a colleague, immediately went into battle.

“No, Rob. You can’t do that.”

Then, essentially:

“If Fran goes, I’m going too.”

And:

“What’s she even done anyway other than a shit tonne of work?”

Which was incredibly loyal.

And, to be fair, she wasn’t wrong about the work.

I did do a shit tonne of it.

Unfortunately that defence doesn’t entirely cancel out calling your manager a dickhead.

I knew I’d overstepped.

Deep down, even underneath all the fury, I knew.

So naturally I handled the rest of the situation with enormous dignity and maturity.

I picked up the pile of access cards I’d been working on all week.

A huge stack.

And let them fall across the desk.

Like fifty-two-card pickup.

“GOOD LUCK FINDING SOMEBODY WHO WORKS AS HARD AS ME.”

Then I stomped out.

But apparently that wasn’t enough of an exit.

Because I then went across the corridor to tell all my running friends that I’d been fired.

Then I went down the corridor to tell my other friends.

Essentially I conducted a small farewell tour of the NHS Informatics department announcing that Rob had fired me for calling him a dickhead and besmirching his name everywhere I went.

At least I owned it.

There was no mysterious:

“Fran has decided to pursue other opportunities.”

No.

Fran had called Rob a dickhead.

Fran had been fired.

Fran was currently making sure everybody on the floor knew about it.

And poor Rob.

Because looking back now, with another twenty years of life behind me, he probably didn’t deserve the full force of my wrath that day.

He was my manager.

I’d been late.

His manager had asked where I was.

He was annoyed.

He said something he probably shouldn’t have said.

And then I escalated matters spectacularly.

I sometimes think about that young version of me.

Driving around Manchester in the Grande Rouge.

Running around Ancoats at lunchtime.

Showering in a Portaloo in an empty office.

Opening filing cabinets that had somehow travelled from the Harold Shipman trial into our everyday workplace.

Interviewing doctors.

Meeting sexual health teams and quietly thinking that perhaps one day I might work in that world too.

Making NHS cards.

Working incredibly hard when nobody was standing over me.

Laughing with Michelle and Steph.

Trying not to stare at Adrian because God had apparently spent additional time on his face.

Discovering that Geoff was not pronounced Gee-off.

And eventually scattering a week’s worth of work across a desk before storming out of one of the best jobs I’d ever had.

There are jobs you remember because they began a career.

Jobs that gave you a qualification.

Jobs that led neatly onto the next thing.

This job didn’t lead neatly anywhere.

But perhaps it did leave little clues.

It showed me how well I worked when I had freedom.

It showed me that I needed movement, variety, people and autonomy.

And somewhere in a sexual health clinic in Greater Manchester, it planted a thought about sex, bodies and human relationships that would eventually become part of my life years later.

I couldn’t have known any of that then.

I didn’t know I had ADHD.

I didn’t know I’d one day train to work with people around sexuality and bodies.

I didn’t know that some jobs aren’t really stepping stones at all.

Sometimes they’re breadcrumb trails.

Little pieces of yourself scattered backwards through your life, only obvious once you turn around and look at them.

Although occasionally the breadcrumb is less subtle.

Occasionally it’s a pile of NHS access cards scattered across a desk while you’re shouting:

“GOOD LUCK FINDING SOMEONE WHO WORKS AS HARD AS ME.”

And occasionally it’s printed on a card.

G-E-O-F-F.

Geoff.

Not Gee-off.

I know that now.