SHONA was twenty-one going on forty. She looked even younger than she was, especially without make-up on — she could have been fifteen or sixteen. But she took teams of men twice her age onto trains that trundled out East and into what they called “low-dem” areas like an army major leading her troops.

They were always sending Shona and her team to these low-dem zones. Places where there seemed to be hardly anyone around, except kids on bikes — not riding them, just lounging about, like American teenagers do in films — and the odd, skinny woman hurrying by with plastic bags of food billowing from her wrists, a fag in her mouth, a phone cocked under her ear.

Michael, for all his hard-man fairytales of child/drug smuggling and juvenile spells, always got sent to the West End, where he drank cappuccinos with his team to boost “morale” and swindled students with false sob stories and a sweet, doe-eyed, guilt-trippy sincerity that made me want to throw up.

Every Monday morning meeting, they would force us to cheer for him when his team inevitably hit the mysterious “KPI’s.” Shona always got told she could “do better” — they knew she could do better, knew she had it in her, had seen it. You couldn’t say anything about the disparity between the areas they’d been in. Disposable income wasn’t a factor in the equation. It was all about the mindset! Positive thinking! Good energy!

I can’t tell you how many intelligent, hard-working people fell for this patter. You began by mocking it but, like the best propaganda, it seeped its way, jingle by jingle, into the folds of your tired, worn-out, over-stimulated brain.

Basic logic was contested. You began to believe that there was “no such thing as a bad area, only bad fundraisers.” Days without results were “doughnuts,” shameful as sugar to a compulsive dieter; being told to take a few unpaid days off “to recharge” was “support.”

Complaining about any of this was “negativity” — a doom-filled word with the ability to get you fired immediately, seen as a betrayal of the charity itself and everything it stood for. There was always the quiet fear of sudden dismissal, even among the most loyal supporters of the regime. Nobody was safe.

We were in a weird world. Often joining with the plan to leave once you’ve found “real work,” you either get sacked in the first week or stay, with that same temporal mindset, for years. If you can prove that you are able to hit targets in your first few weeks, the charity gets to work on you.

They have an utterly pointless probationary period, meaningless because regardless of whether you’ve been there for ten minutes or ten years, they always maintain the right to instantly fire you. Passing probation is just there to boost your self-esteem, to instigate the delusion that fundraising is a sustainable occupation. If you do well, managers start to talk about your “fundraising career,” using themselves as examples of how you can climb up the ladder, find yourself with a salaried job and a seat in an office at some vague, mythical point in the future, years and years and years down the line.

Keen to distract you from the reality of how shit the work is, they have a knack for making you feel special. Face-to-face fundraisers are constantly told they are heroes for doing the work that they do, probably more than life-saving doctors are. If you ever start to show signs of disillusionment, you can expect a nurturing call from a manager to “pep you up.”

As a result, the majority of face-to-face fundraisers, the ones that stick around for more than six weeks, develop an almost pathological complex. They are marooned between managers who explicitly tell them they alone are the reason why “the children are being saved” and the general public that almost universally hates them.

Every space in a city has its own neat purpose. People hated us because we didn’t operate from a space that was designed and designated for our purpose. “Step inside my office!”  — that was a common joke among the street fundraising team.

That section ended up getting shut down because of all the abuse. People were snarled at, spit at, reported, even attacked. On the doors, it wasn’t much better. “How did you get my address?” was almost always the first response from the people who answered their buzzers.

People without much money were more inclined to listen but suspicion was rife everywhere. Darren got chased down the stairs of a high-rise in Springburn by an angry guy with a kitchen knife for saying “good evening.” Deirdre and I once climbed up about twenty steps to an absurd-looking renovated castle in Edinburgh, only to have the young English woman who answered the door shriek and push her small child into the living room, as if we were there to abduct him.

“How dare you come to my house like this!” she shrilled. “If you don’t like fundraisers, you can get a sticker saying ‘no cold callers’ to put on your door,” said Deirdre politely. The woman’s eyes bulged. “If this was America,” I thought, “she’d be grabbing her rifle from behind the door right now.”

“Don’t you tell me what to put on My Front Door, thank you,” she hissed. The door slammed. It was weirdly prim, the way she slammed it. It’s funny how posh English people always say thank you, even when they’re pissed off.

We took a second to admire the view of Arthur’s Seat. It sat there, big green lump. Nature always underwhelmed me when it was capitalised on by wankers. Things were only beautiful because people said they were, then they made money out of it. We trudged down those stupidly long, ostentatious steps.

The managers at these charities face the daunting task of somehow persuading workers who have no job security, no contract, no sick pay, no holiday leave and who experience an extreme level of aggression every day, not to leave, and they do so skilfully.

While the turnover rate is high, a core group of loyal fundraisers can usually be counted on. This crew is mismatched,  made up of skint artists who have been “in-between jobs” for ten years, bored, overqualified graduates sucked into the “climbing up the ladder” myth, hippies, young single parents trapped in the grind, people who have been coming and going for years, quitting then returning as soon as they need cash, people who are just too crazy and erratic to ever finish school or college, or a contract, or stay in any sort of structured environment for long.

The managers bring these people together and build a narrative out of them: a family who are fighting to make a difference. Everybody needs money. Everybody wants to protect themselves. The familial, “we’re all in this together” sentiment is the shield against the hate, the scorn, the mockery and the poverty.

And as with any cult — even the good ones — vulnerable people make the best recruits.

On the Doors is published by Speculative Books, price £7.99.