My Own Voice Left A Voicemail Telling Me Not To Take The Job

The voicemail came in at 04:12 on a Tuesday. The caller ID is my own number.

The message is eleven seconds. It is me — my voice, my accent, the way I do that little intake of breath before I say something difficult. My mother listened to it and cried.

It says: "Don't take the job. It's not the money. It's the man on the third floor. Please."

I had, at that point, been offered a job. I had not told anybody outside my house. I had not signed anything. The salary was very good and I was going to take it.

I did not take it.

I want to be honest about why, because "a ghost told me" is a lie. I did not take it because I could not stop hearing the "please". It was not spooky. It was tired. It sounded like a man who has already had the argument several times and has run out of ways to put it.

Fourteen months later, the company was in the news. Not dramatically — it was a small item in the trade press and then a longer one in a real paper. A senior man, third floor, had done things to junior staff over a period of years, and the company had known, and the company had moved him rather than removed him.

I did not know that man's name. I had never met him. I had been interviewed by two people, on the ground floor, in a glass box.

I still have the file. I have played it to eight people.

My phone company says there is no record of a call from my number to my number that night, and that this is not possible, and that I must have "made the recording another way", and they said it kindly, which was somehow worse.

Four of the eight people will no longer discuss it. One of them, my old flatmate, asked me to delete it, and when I said no, he said, "Then don't play it in my house."

I would like to say I have made peace with this. I have not. What I have done is take a worse job, for less money, in a building with two floors, and I have been happier than I have any right to be.

The message ends with the "please". There is no goodbye.