THE NEWS that BT have taken over EE this week brought back some memories for me.

I worked at its Darlington call centre in the summer of 2004 which formed the final leg of my North-East Call Centre Tour 2002-4.

It employs 2,000 workers – Darlington’s biggest private employer.

Call centres have a certain reputation for being the easy way out when a youngster leaves school. In truth, it’s one of the few jobs anyone, literally anyone, can do. And, when I was a skint student, there were plenty of jobs knocking about at a wage that could almost be called comfortable.

I only worked at the Darlington call centre – then under the umbrella of Orange – for a few weeks, in the collections department, calling up people demanding payment of their overdue phone bills.

I’d previously worked at the Orange North Tyneside centre a year earlier and was given a staff phone, on which I’d ran up a horrendous bill that I couldn’t pay. You can imagine my horror when one of the first calls I had to make on my first day was to my own number.

The North Tyneside role was my first proper job. A crop of about 15 of us started on the same day and were given the same standardised training. To say we were a diverse bunch was an understatement.

We had a former landscape gardener whose mental arithmetic was superb, on account of his years of providing quotes to customers – but he was broad Geordie and few could understand him.

Then there was the guy who got so drunk on a night out that he rolled into work the next day with a bottle of rum concealed in his trousers and had to be forcibly removed by security staff.

Day by day, our number reduced. It was like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I imagined the two people left at the end of the three-week training got to own Orange.

A few of our group were not the sharpest tools in the box. Our trainer had a propensity to use funny voices and, when he instructed us to enter a command into the computer system, he said: “Nein!” in a thick German accent.

As we moved on to the next step, a girl in the corner was getting increasingly frustrated with her computer. It turned out she’d typed “9”, and not the German for “no.”

We bade auf weidersehen to her not long after.

I have enough call centre tales to write a book about, so I’ll keep them back for a rainy day.

WE’RE the proud owners of a brand new shed as of this week.

The one we got for our last house was the size of a Portaloo yet took me three days to build, much to the amusement of our neighbours who I could hear sniggering from their lofty perch overlooking the back garden.

This time around, I defied my DIY ban, dusted off the drill and threw the whole thing up inside five hours, despite it being twice the size of the old one.

I was determined not to cut any corners, and I have heeded the advice on the instructions that read: “Treat your shed before building it”.

I’ve taken it for a slap-up meal and a night at the theatre. Hope that will do.