Interview and photography by Veronika Merkova
I met Kostantinos during his shift, outside TGI Fridays, while he was waiting to pick up his delivery. He has been working as a delivery guy for 8 years now and he is married with two kids. I wonder how it is to work during the lockdown. He tells me, emphasising that these are his own personal views:
During the pandemic the only thing I can say is that we faced the fear of Coronavirus and we saw fear in our customer faces. Some would half-open the door and watched us with fear and some wouldn’t even do that, and behind the door would ask us to leave it there.
It was all unknown and unheard of, the city was empty and there were no cars anywhere. We were used to the traffic and we often had to even get on the pavements to get things on time, now everything was empty, facing that made us scared too. That was the situation that we faced, but there was solidarity between us and with our co-workers. Sometimes, we would voluntarily offer to deliver things to people in our neighborhood.
The idea behind it is that we were already out and about so that they would not have to leave their house. We had people vulnerable and people with crutches. There was a case of a lady that asked me to come in and even though I was scared I couldn’t leave her so I’ve left her food on her table.
Now, we’re coming back to normality. People aren’t that terrified anymore, they’re even starting to tip you in cash, before they would do it by card. They have the need to see you now, to see people. They greet us and they appreciate us more now, they don’t treat us like they used to, when they would shut the door on you. We are coming back to feelings, having feelings for one another. What I mean by that is that they are grateful now, before they wouldn’t think about the condition that we would be working under like rain, cold etc.
Now, during this pandemic and with the fear for your life they appreciated the job we are doing and we worked hard for so many people. We had much more work, a lot more work and more deliveries.
