Dead Switch

I went back to work today and found I’d been erased.

Three months off.

Twenty-three years on the job.

And somehow… gone from the system.

Not gone in a dramatic way. No send-off. No fuss.

Just little things.

My name missing from the rota.

Logins not working.

Bits of the day that used to be automatic… suddenly not there anymore.

Nothing you can’t fix.

But it still lands like a punch in the gut when you’re not expecting it.

On a road sweeper or a dustcart there’s a switch.

One flick and the whole machine shuts down.

Brushes stop.

Water stops.

Everything goes quiet.

They call it an isolator.

We call it a dead switch.

It’s there for safety.

Thing is, people have one too.

You can spend years with someone, working beside them, talking every day, sharing the same routines, same moans, same early mornings in the rain…

and then one day you realise you haven’t seen them for a couple of weeks.

No big fallout.

No argument.

Just life doing what life does.

And click.

Dead switch.

They vanish from your world like the machine’s been isolated.

No noise.

No drama.

Just gone.

I’ve had it with blokes I worked with for years.

Faces you saw more than your own family some weeks.

Shared jokes. Shared graft. Shared moaning.

We had a bloke die once.

Riding his bike home from work.

Ten years he’d been with us.

And the sad thing was…

not many people were even sure who he was.

You’d hear it going round the yard,

“Who was it?”

“Which one was he?”

That stuck with me.

People are always saying,

“If that was me, the whole bloody town would know.”

I’ve probably said it myself.

I’m loud enough.

Hard to miss.

But the truth is…

it don’t always work like that.

It’s different now anyway.

When I first started, it was the council.

Same faces year after year.

You knew who you were working with.

Knew their kids’ names, their habits, who’d be late, who’d bring the biscuits.

You was a team.

Now it’s contracts.

One company, then another.

Moved around, shifted about.

You’re not really part of anything for long enough anymore.

Names come and go.

And half the time you’re just another name on a screen somewhere.

Easy to add.

Easy to remove.

Like it don’t make much difference either way.

Then the job changes.

Or you move on.

Or they do.

And that’s it.

You tell yourself you’ll stay in touch.

Maybe you even mean it at the time.

But life gets in the way.

New routines.

New faces.

And before you know it…

they’ve been switched off.

Not just from your phone.

From your day-to-day life.

From your head.

And the truth is… you do it as well.

You flick the switch on people without even realising.

Not out of spite.

Not because they’ve done anything wrong.

Just because… time moves on.

It’s not just people you’ve worked with either.

I realised the other day it’s happening everywhere.

Not just right now, but all the time.

David Bowie. Gone.

Lemmy. Gone.

Bruce Forsyth. Gone.

Background voices to your life.

On the radio in the morning.

In the car.

On the telly.

Part of the furniture.

When you’re young, you think that furniture is permanent.

You don’t question it.

It’s just always been there, so it always will be.

But it ain’t.

Turns out the furniture’s being quietly taken out of the room…

while you’re still sitting in it.

No announcement.

No big moment.

Just one day you hear a name and think,

“Blimey… I haven’t heard that in years.”

And then you find out why.

And even then…

life carries on.

One second. A blink… and you’re gone.

Work carries on.

The streets still need sweeping.

Bins still need emptying.

New names appear on the rota.

New voices come on the radio.

Everything keeps moving.

And if you’re not careful…

you don’t even notice what’s been taken away.

Same as that switch on the sweeper.

It’s not dramatic.

It’s not loud.

There’s no explosion, no big ending.

Just a quiet, simple action.

One click.

And it’s gone.

This morning it was my name missing off a screen.

A small thing, really. Easily sorted.

But it was enough to remind me how it works.

How easy it is to disappear from something you’ve been part of for years.

How quickly the world adjusts without you.

And how often we do the same to other people without even thinking about it.

One click.

Dead switch.

Gone.