Cack-Handed by Gina Yashere

Author:Gina Yashere [Yashere, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amistad
Published: 2021-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

11

The Same Sun That Melts Wax Also Hardens Clay

When my letter of employment from Otis arrived just a week after my interview, I was overjoyed. I was to be the first female lift engineer in Otis UK’s hundred-year history. For Americans, lifts are what you guys call elevators. Usually Americans are the ones who tend to go for the more literal, obvious words to describe things, like “fall” instead of “autumn” (presumably because the leaves are falling), “sidewalk” instead of “pavement” (because, of course, you are walking on the side of a road), but on this occasion, the Brits must have decided to give it a try and go with the box that “lifts” things.

When I was younger, I was actually afraid of lifts. I avoided them as often as I could, and when I couldn’t, I never got inside one alone. I would wait for at least two other people, so if anything went wrong, we’d all go screaming to our deaths together. Misery loves company. I didn’t understand how they worked, and I’d seen too many horror movies in which lifts plunged down the shaft, pulverizing everybody in them (The Towering Inferno), or they were taken over by the child of Satan and cut unsuspecting scientists in half like a sandwich (Damien: Omen II). So when I left school and gravitated towards a career in engineering, lifts were the absolute furthest thing from my mind.

The following Monday I was supposed to report to the Isle of Dogs office to begin engineer training, which would involve following an engineer around who maintained all the lifts in that area. The Isle of Dogs is an area of East London that doesn’t have any more dogs than anywhere else in London, so the name is a mystery. It’s a part of East London that at the beginning of the century was full of bustling ports and trading, but it fell into disuse and poverty and was earmarked for regeneration. Glistening new apartment buildings had since sprung up among the existing drab council estates, and a whole new financial district was in the works.

I turned up on Monday morning, excited and ready to get started. I was assigned a uniform of a blue Otis sweater, matching blue trousers, and steel-toed work shoes, which I changed into, and I stood in the general area outside my new manager’s office, waiting to be assigned a work partner. A steady stream of white, male Otis engineers passed by to pick up their assignments for the week, and they all stared at the young Black woman dressed identically to them.

I had seen the advert for the job in the Evening Standard, a daily London newspaper with a great job advertisement page. Thursday was engineering day, so every Thursday, I scoured the paper’s job listings, looking for my next adventure, and this was where I found the advert that changed my life: a trainee engineer position with Otis, the largest lift company in the world. I had

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