YOUR DELIVERY INSTRUCTIONS
(PART 5 OF THE RESEARCH FINDINGS)
Despite the couriers’ statement on how well they know the city, most of the time they report using GPS applications when navigating. This fact further convinces me their ‘neighbourhood making’ is motivated by negotiation of conditions, rather than by geographical factors or navigational ends. This ‘making’ is about knowing the edges past which the volume of action (the proliferation of restaurants), as it were, fades out. Addresses (spatial coordinates) seem to be dedicated with less attention than with features (of the city, e.g., restaurants, culturally oriented considerations and expectations). Participants understand their radiuses mostly in visual terms, they know its edges on the map and the name of the roads representing its threshold — but again, it seems that when they say that they are familiar with the city, they mostly mean its features, rather than the location of addresses. But this is not completely clear cut, of course. Seeing an address’ pin on a map might be more helpful for them, and more familiar to them, perhaps even more accurate to them, than getting an address (textually by name). Hence, in the introduction of this study, I stressed the role of digital, visual, demonstrative tools for practices of ‘neighbourhood making’ taken by my participants.
What GPS apps cannot provide is guidance on ‘flow maintenance’, which is how Adam names the desired progress of his productivity. What might interrupt Adam’s flow amounts to a sizeable (but not oversized) list, relevant to this section are unfamiliarity and logistics. ‘I always find the address thanks to Google Maps’, Adam says, but maintaining a productive flow — as we learn from him — is not just gained by finding the drop-off’s address, but by managing your way there; working with a GPS in unfamiliar areas, he notes, actually challenges the flow. Flow maintenance, Adam notes, includes dealing with out of sight entrances, calling the ordering clients for assistance (e.g., asking for the building’s door access code), finding a place for locking the bicycles, etc.
Considering a ‘flow’, some couriers leave their bicycles in the client’s staircase (ground floor) if the entrance is secured with a code or a doorman. This may not at all be simple: the doorman might not allow couriers to bring their bicycles into the lobby and thus bring forth what seems to Adam as a clash of interests that are sourced from the same origin, the client. On the one hand, it is much quicker (and safer) to bring his bicycles into the lobby rather than locking them outside and avoid delivering the food with delays, on the other hand, the doorman represents the interests of the building’s residents (amongst which is the ordering client) who prefer couriers to leave their mode of transportation outside. Having been refused to do so, the bicycles must be secured with a lock outside, to a suitable object, and this, as you might have guessed, interrupts the flow — even more so if no mountable object is nearby. The clients’s instructions, too, may be inaccurate, poorly phrased, and more distractive than helpful. Altogether, the conclusion that Adam arrives at is one: constant, uninterrupted movement (flow) equals productivity.
Adam iconises the ordering client’s door (and the staircase or lift) as a fulfilment of deliveries — as something of which essence is that ‘flow’. From what I gather, the elements of the indoors really symbolise a mission’s completion. Both Adam and Dror sent me photos that tell the same story in a very similar way: this story depicts them, standing in a lift, holding a take-away bag. This reminds us that couriers do not just navigate in streets, but also inside buildings. They do not just move left or right and back or forth, but also up and down. The indoors, symbolising the fulfilment of a delivery, also interestingly remind us that these are the only grounds for which Google-Maps (or any other GPS app) has not prepared a demonstrative. Nevertheless, going indoors that way embarks conditions that seem to be experienced with stability and predictability.
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Selfie provided by Adam
Selfie provided by Dror
Couriers in lifts right before handing the orders to the clients. Both Adam and Dror make sure to include the order within the frame; Adam keeps it in his thermal box, and since Dror's thermal box is geared to his bicycles, he is holding the order himself. As the indoors and the lift may symbolise the fulfilment of deliveries, the mirror provides them with an opportunity to reflect, in this context perhaps, on their own productivity.
Even if it may seem all buildings are ‘navigated’ through in similar ways, one might be surprised to hear the participants’ impressions of the matter. To exemplify are the instructions Dror has received once from an ordering client on how to open their building’s entrance door. These instructions included not a key-code, but in-depth instructions on how to turn the knob and how to work the axis. As absurd as they may seem, these instructions were much needed. This, incidentally, was not a faulty door one has to handle with care, but a customised, possibly posh, giant door — an entrance to a luxurious, renewed, old building. It is worth mentioning that Dror struggled quite a bit getting into and outside of this building, guidance or none. Some intercoms, too, require special attention, even though Dror self-testifies to know (because of his job) almost every intercom system in town (two or three systems are extremely ubiquitous).
The residential indoors leave Google-Maps (or any other GPS app) blind, and thus almost leave the couriers to their own devices (no pun intended) — almost, but not completely. The couriers may be given with — in the order’s details — delivery (access) instructions specified by the ordering clients themselves, and in any case, the courier can call the client for instructions. To reiterate, the gateway to the indoors is one factor left unaccounted by the courier’s ‘neighbourhood making’, and it remains unpredictable because the apps they use for navigation do not demonstrate such indoors. As the gateway experience (the issue of accessing the building) is differentiated from the indoors experience, it is not contradictory to the earlier finding which noted that the indoors are experienced as stable and predictable.
Screenshot and video provided by Adam
(left) A screenshot of an order's details with specific delivery instructions (written by the ordering client): 'the entrance is on the left side of the building, there will be a glass door on the right leading to a staircase, second-floor white door with superheroes' stickers' (sic).
(right) Following the client's instructions, Adam has filmed the order's drop-off.
Dror suspects that his experience of clients' indoors is vastly different from that of the people who actually reside there. This suspicion is directed almost specifically and exclusively at high-end residential buildings. Dror says that while he gets to enter magnificent front entrances and walk through luxuriously ornate lobbies, the residents do not experience this plentiful aspect of the building in which they reside. He speculates that those who reside in such buildings own cars, and thus drive into the parking lot and take the lift up to their level — missing out on the opulent façade. Their experience is less lavish, Dror reckons, because it seems that this exhibition of wealth is reserved for guests rather than residents. Having had crossed such lobbies and been made certain that certain buildings are habitat to the wealthier, Dror cannot predict that a certain delivery is made by a wealthy client by their address (nor by the restaurant the client orders from). Tel-Aviv, he says, is very diversified. So diversified that certain areas will have neglected buildings and high-end projects, that he cannot speculate on the ordering client’s income when considering a delivery opportunity. Even more so, he thinks this is irrelevant along with any expectation regarding tips such clients might give— what matters is the number of deliveries completed in a timeframe. Therefore, projections as to the indoors of the ordering clients seem less important to couriers than the maintenance of a productive flow, a flow that corresponds to the ‘gateway’ accessibility. Therefore, the fact that their ‘made neighbourhood’ cannot account for the indoors or the gateways shows that it relies on digital tools that demonstrate the city (e.g. maps apps that give guidance cannot demonstrate the residential indoors) and on the food-delivery app they use (which cannot fully prepare the couriers to the gateways).