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Occupational role changes

For some respondents their job role changed dramatically:

I mean we became in a certain way, we became somebody to phone up and chat to because people felt lifeless and it was lovely that people did that. We could share their problems and it was so horrific for the people who went down with Foot & Mouth at the beginning. I can remember one man calling me, no I phoned him, because I started phoning people after they went down, and all our customers, I phoned them when I knew. Because continually we were on the phone to the Ministry finding out who was the next one, who was the next one. And um I used to phone them all up and sort of just have a bit of a chat. And one man, a 40 year old man he just couldn’t fake, he was in tears, and he was always the person who came on and spoke to me, pulled me leg, chatted away, great character, and he couldn’t speak to me. And I came off the phone and I was just in tears. And I said, “I’m not gonna phone anybody up” I couldn’t after that.

In a crisis situation the first thing that you would normally do,[. . .] is go, to be alongside people in their pain and it was the one thing that you couldn"t do. (…) Often it is just as you got your hand on the door to go that the real problem surfaces, and a telephone relationship is less than adequate for spotting those signals. You know what I mean. So you spent hours on the phone but not quite knowing whether what you were doing was any good.

I think you go into auto-pilot, … We seemed to take it in turns, so when I was down he was alright, and when he was down I was alright, so we"d sort of you know, if you"re both down at the same time you just say, ‘well sorry it"s not your turn it"s mine’.

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