Nehaveigur

As I was about to enter my house, a man stepped out of an old car parked on the other side of the street and ran towards me. “Excuse!” he shouted and showed me his cell phone. “Where?” On the screen there was a street address that I knew to be just around the corner, and I said so, gesticulating in the right direction.

As I talked, I realized that he didn’t take in what I was saying. He was around fifty years old, bolding, disheveled and distraught. Again, he showed me his phone. “DoorDash!” he said. He was a driver for the food delivery service, and he was badly lost. Since my pointing and explaining didn’t help, and since the address that his phone told him to go to was so close, I decided to guide him. I walked ahead and he followed me, carrying a white plastic bag that presumably contained food from a local restaurant. He said “Spasibo” and I asked him if he spoke Russian, which he did. It turned out that my Russian was better than his English, which says a lot, because I learned the language for two years at high school, which was a long time ago. I have rarely used it since apart from a short trip to Georgia (the country, not the state) a few years ago.

He said that he had been driving around the block a few times, which, considering the simple street layout, was strange enough that I started wondering if he this was some sort of trick. Was his accomplice burgling my house while he distracted me?

When we arrived at the delivery address, he became even more distraught, since it turned out that he again didn’t know what to do. I told him to put the plastic bag on the porch and to knock on the door. Since no-one opened, I helped him click through the DoorDash app on his phone to confirm that he had delivered to food to the right address. His phone didn’t have adequate reception so it too some time. On the way back to my unburgled house and his car, I tried some more of my Russian with him, but now he was too anxious to answer. He was clearly not well, but he was also keen to get going. He said “Spasibo” one more time, got in his car and drove off.

It’s easy to forget how hard life is for some people. I get mildly annoyed if I lose some money on the stock market because of the latest tariffs, but like all the other things that I feel make my life difficult, it’s a luxury problem to have.