Portraits of Members: Courier-Psychotherapist Timas Petraitis

I have three jobs. The oldest one—I'm a psychologist-psychotherapist, I have my own office and I've been working as a therapist in private practice for 17 years. People imagine that we have a full-time job of 8 hours, but it's actually less than that, because if you consult five people a day, it's enough, you feel satiated.

There was a client who was studying abroad, and he told me how he worked as a courier. I listened and listened until I realised that I would actually love to do that too. Maybe it's a bit out of my subject, but why not give it a try?

Two years ago I tried, got that Bolt bag, then waited about a year for Wolt to get accepted. Now it's been a year that I work at both both firms and I'm enjoying it immensely, even more than my main business. I feel so alive. There is an orienteering sport called rogaining, where you have to run or cycle for six hours and reach checkpoints. I've tried it and it's very similar. I do as much rogaining as I want, and for money!

I used to watch on YouTube how couriers in New York ride around with fixies, and I also work mostly with fixies. A fixie is a super light bike that has only one gear. It's fixed, there's no freewheel, you're constantly pedalling. That's the moral —you have to be careful with your Youtube content, because it might actually come true.

And the third activity—I am a dad, I have an eight-year-old son. That's my three jobs, fatherhood and the other two. I call my job as a courier a responsible pastime, and sometimes in my spare time I Bolt around by car together with my kid.

As a psychologist, I can talk about the stress of courier work in two terms. The first is eustress: a short-term, excitatory stress on the body, which is what I usually experience. The second is distress, which is a negative, chronic, prolonged stress that I do not experience at all in courier work. Diving between cars, critical situations - even more fun for me, because my main job is sedentary. You're in a calm state, listening half the day, meditating, so cycling is the right thing for me, as a counterbalance.

My parents used to take me to the swimming pool and to karate classes from a very young age. I got the notion that you can't not do sport. They didn't take me to cycling, but as a kid, my friends and I used to play hide-and-seek and chase on our bikes. I also do not understand how one can not read books. Even now, I take a book with me everywhere I go—I stop, read a bit, get an order, and off I go again.

One of my biggest fears was that I would get hooked on couriering, but I thought, no, I wouldn't survive on that. I sat down, I calculated that if I switched to the car when I get tired, I would survive, although now Bolt has lowered the rates even more, it's even harder...

But if you pedal all day on Saturday, you can make a hundred euros, I've made a hundred and twenty once. If you pedal every other day you can get a normal salary, but of course it's risky, you have to avoid breaking your arms and legs. I was expecting to see that I wouldn't survive by couriering, but I realised that, hell, it's my decision. It was very difficult [laughs]. If I want to, I can just work as a courier and nothing will fall apart. But for now I'm holding on, I'm not throwing away therapy.

When I started working as a courier, I found a documentary by "Nara", where three couriers were filmed during the quarantine: a dance teacher in Vilnius who drove a Prius, and Linas Mazgeika in Kaunas, the coordinator of the Courier Association. He was pedalling through the winter and gave such a nice story, and it blew my mind. Then I discovered that he had a workshop called Ride&Mend with a colleague, and I started to repair my bike there, and that's how I met him.

Little by little, he talked me into joining G1PS and the Courier Association. I was alarmed by the minimum membership fee of five euros, because I'm already in an international association of therapists, and I already pay there. It was a bit of a deterrent, but Linas gave me such a nice reasoning, explained what the money was used for—and I have money afterall—so I took the plunge and joined.

I wonder how all these firms work. Bolt doesn't organise meetings, but Wolt does, and I used to go to those meetings, ask questions, dig for all sorts of injustice. For example, they give very low radii for the bikes for food delivery, and I, being sporty, turn on the motorcycle mode and it displays a larger area.

Sometimes you arrive and they give you a pizza forty-two centimetres in diameter, without any warning. I have no idea what motorcyclists do, because their bags are identical. You can contact support but no one will compensate anything. You ride three kilometres, you're all drenched in sweat, you look at that big pizza, you cancel your order and get nothing. It is such an injustice, a system error, which would be very easy to correct—so that only the cars would get those big pizzas. I have written dozens of messages to both companies, but nobody responds.

Another injustice is that if you choose the bicycle mode, in Vilnius and Kaunas you only get orders in a few districts. There has been no announcement, no information about it. I myself only found out by accident. For example, in Dainava, one of my favourite districts, where there are no hills and you can get a big radius, when you switch on the bike mode, they just don't offer orders.

It turns out that they did this because a lot of cyclists cancelled their orders when they saw that they had to pedal uphill from somewhere like Laisvės Avenue. But they did not inform anyone about this. And I like sport, and I sometimes take the hills on purpose. Then, when I decide to switch to motorbike mode, it shows all the orders, but I get these big pizzas... Well, that's the kind of nonsense you have to deal with. Wolt is still somewhat responsive when you write them for the third time, but Bolt is completely inactive.

Couriering has little meaning. I have invested a lot of time, energy and money in psychology, and if you manage to help someone through conversations, then you feel like you've done something meaningful, not like delivering a kebab to someone. Sometimes I say it's a lazy people's service, but there's a lot of vitality in riding that bike, orienting around, making instant decisions, riding around potholes, but if you only did that, you'd start to miss the depth of life.

As far as I read in the couriers' Facebook groups, if they made some kind of fixed wage, for example, you commit to 10 hours a week, you choose when you work, and attached to that commitment some kind of social security, it would definitely be better for the couriers. The couriers managed to get insurance from Wolt, but it doesn't include health insurance, nor does it include transport with equipment, just a few types of accidents.

In my main job, I'm also self-employed, so I was used to my clients not having to worry about my holidays, my sick leave. When I came to couriering it was the same, but the pay was lower.

Then I started to think, yeah, it's really very convenient for them: we take care of transport, equipment, mobile phones, clothes. Of course, Wolt gets a plus for the outfit, but it doesn't make up for everything else. In my main job I work with private individuals, it's not like some company sends clients, but in couriering it's already big corporations.

Now I am very angry with Bolt: before, the minimum was 2.5€, which was a paradise for bicycles, you get an order for a hundred metres and it's already 2.5€, and now it's 1.3-1.5€, and that's before taxes. Bolt tried to illustrate calculations that cyclists are not getting any less, but in reality they are getting a big cut, for example, if I work the same five hours on a Sunday, I now get about 10€ less. After a while, Bolt admitted in its communication that "yes, cyclists should see a reduction in their earnings".

I have the feeling that they are big corporations and just want to maximise profits for shareholders. It is a classic case of "Yay, we made a million dollars profit this year, let's buy pizzas for the staff". I once said to Wolt that they could at least give the couriers a Wolt+ package, so that when we order, at least the delivery is free—to honour some loyalty, to honour the fact that we are part of your company. So they said "that's a great idea, we should get that too", because not even the employees themselves have that privilege. But, of course, it was all talk and no action.

One of my friends can't understand why I do this job in my spare time. He has his own small printing company, and I am always asking him for stickers or whatever I need. He once sent me some stickers as a present with the words that roughly translate as "slave and loving it". I put them on my Bolt car bag and my Wolt bike bag. My child and I were still sticking them on, we were both so pleased, and then I made the mistake of posting them in the courier group. And Wolt blocked me from their platform.

I had just started working, I waited a year and I was so happy that I had got into Wolt. So I called, I said, what should I do, they said, we still own this bag, so take the sticker off and send us a picture. I peeled it off quickly, sent it out. But the Bolt stikcer is still there, so when I drive the car, I drive it with the sign "slave and loving it".