Shout! Shout! Let it all out!

I hadn’t been having a great day even before the call. I’d missed the 7.22 in the pouring rain; the newspapers had mysteriously gone from my desk; features conference was particularly annoying. And then, during the mid-morning scramble towards the Standard’s edition deadline, the phone rang for the first of the daily half-dozen times with a stupid, inane recorded telemarketing message: “Hi there…”

I slammed the receiver down hard and dialled The Vent. After five minutes ranting to “ventor” Eva Takacs, I had unloaded my bile towards the phone advertisers, the IT department and assorted Tory politicians. I felt better.

Takacs’s service is the first of its kind in London, this most impatient of cities: the chance to vent your anger to someone who will not act as therapist or psychologist but simply listen as you let off steam. You pay £3.99 for each five-minute block of venting time over the phone (it’s also possible to vent face-to-face at their Liverpool Street offices — a 15-minute “small vent” costs £25.)

I’d like to think that my colleagues directed me to The Vent through feelings of pure altruism, though it seems unlikely. I don’t get angry with people at work. But I do lose it with things and with situations.

Over the years, I’ve got better at controlling my temper. I’ve destroyed only a couple of phones in eight years at the Standard, despite often extreme provocation (those calls in June beginning, “Hello, are you planning Christmas features yet?”). And such fits of temper were, for a while at least, eclipsed by the keyboard-destroying antics of one idiosyncratic reporter colleague.

I’ve also become aware that a forty-something senior executive shouting into a phone looks more intimidating, especially to younger members of staff, than it might once have done. In my early thirties, at an environmental charity, I got so enraged that I punched a hole in my computer: my co-workers were mostly amused by that.

But over the past decade, our reliance on such technology — and our expectation that it will work instantly, every time — has got ever greater. Did office workers used to get as cross with typewriter ribbons running out or dropped phone connections as they do with software glitches and non-web-connecting BlackBerries? I doubt it. It looks like a gap in the market for those dedicated to managing Londoners’ anger: Takacs, a 37-year-old former Samaritan, thinks so.

“Some people really get into it,” she reports. “People scream and cuss — there are lots of f-words and c-words.”

Workplace bullying is a particularly common complaint — which may be one reason why several small companies are now employing her to let their staff sound off confidentially. She also gets referrals from some therapists and counsellors.

Opinion among therapists on the benefits of venting is divided. Since the Sixties, many have held a view that it is better to let out feelings of anger rather than repress them. The link between high, regular levels of anger and heart disease — especially in men — is well established. In its more extreme forms, that emphasis on catharsis led to scream therapy. At a minimum, the assumption tended to be that it was better to let it all out.