£13.26 an Hour, Must Own Quiet Shoes

I want this job. I am flexible, reliable and compassionate, three of the four personal attributes listed. The fourth is professional, which I can do in short bursts. The problem is volume. My keys, which hang off a lanyard from a 2019 fun run, can be heard from the drive.

The advert is not being fussy. Adrian, a retired teacher who went back to invigilate GCSEs and A-levels at the school where he had taught his whole career, listed the rules on his blog in June 2022: no squeaky shoes, no phone notifications, only whispered and “strictly functional conversations” with fellow invigilators. Pencil cases transparent. Drink bottles transparent, labels off. Watches of any kind banned. A two-hour exam flies by for the candidates, he wrote, whereas “for the invigilators time crawls”. His colleagues included retirees, off-duty school nurses, a semi-retired doctor and the adult son of a teacher. Somewhere in England there is an exam hall staffed like the last chapter of an Agatha Christie.

Noise is not a small matter to the people at the desks. In a 2022 Reddit thread about the sounds of the exam hall, one pupil remembered a chemistry teacher they liked, whose keys round his neck jangled through the Year 10 and 11 mocks. For the real GCSEs, he took them off, to the pupil’s relief. I looked at my lanyard for some time.

On Sunday I auditioned my shoes on the kitchen tiles. The ankle boots clicked. The trainers squeaked on the turn. The sandals slapped like applause from a small crowd that didn’t mean it. My husband, reading over my shoulder, found the duty to assist with “the dismissal of candidates in silence” and asked how I planned to dismiss anyone in silence when I cannot dismiss the cat. The cat has never once been dismissed. The final duty is to do other reasonable tasks “as directed by the cleaning supervisor”. I would do those too. I would mop unobtrusively.

So I took the keys off the lanyard, put on my husband’s thickest walking socks and practised. On Sunday evening I stood in the kitchen doorway, as unobtrusive as possible, for eleven minutes. Nobody noticed me. I heard my whole family agree, at length and with examples, that I am the loudest person any of them has ever met.

The advert gives a closing date of midday on 9 October. I am applying. I have the socks.