“I don’t want to have contact. I want to be able to be just as safe as the people who are at home in quarantine and I don’t get that option. I think people need to understand that not everyone who’s working right now really wants to be there.” Robin Allison is a postal worker in Akron struggling with anxiety as an essential employee.
“I do a lot of praying and I just have to really try to stay positive because I’ve caught myself a few times being angry, like ‘Why are you [customers] here? Is it important?’”
Three X’s are marked in red tape on the post office floor signaling exactly six feet of distance between patrons.
Because of the pandemic, Robin’s been pushing for more safety in the office she works at. “This counter is of six feet so that’s why I always sit back. I begged for the x’s on the floor, and then they finally did it three days later. I begged for a sign- I wrote a sign- and they were like that’s not good, and then two days later they wrote their own.”
To further reduce potential infection, Robin thinks there should be a slim down of actual person to person contact. “I told them the other day I may need to go speak to EAP. I told my supervisor, ‘You don’t get the opportunity to tell me how to feel, because I’m the one on the front line.’ I even deal with more people than the carriers. They say, ‘Well we touch 800 mailboxes,’ and I say ‘Yah, but I’d rather right now be touching mailboxes than handling people and face to face contact,’” she said.
Robin prepares to put on gloves, but the customer, who is standing on the red X only has a question, no package to be transferred.
Though Robin has a mask, gloves, disinfectant and is already a heavy cleaner, she’s not convinced for her safety or the safety of others. “The fact that we don’t know enough scares me. We don’t know how long it lives on surfaces, for real. We hear a lot of things. We don’t know how long it lives on packages, from anywhere in the country or in the world.”
Like many of us, the invisibility of the virus makes Robin anxious, “Just thinking- all the activity I deal with, it won’t show up for weeks in me or may not show up at all. But that one elderly lady who needs her two stamps- she could get it from me. And I just wish people would stay home, if it’s not important or dire or essential. The tensions are high. I kept thinking ‘Ok am I being paranoid, cause I have a headache’ and I think its my own psychosomatic process of dealing with it. The fear of thinking that you feel a tickle, the fear of coughing just to clear your throat, is what people deal with now that we didn’t before. I think that paranoia is beating us up. I don’t know how you deal with it.”
To help herself and her kids, Robin’s stocked the house with more vitamins and has been saving money. She’s worried because she knows a lot of businesses aren’t going to be able to survive this, so she and her fiancé have been ordering their meals out, “I order out my food every day, I didn’t use to but I do it now because I feel like I’m helping someone.”
Robin said her fiancé has been very positive but she’s realistic, “I agree with it. But being positive and being sincere about how you feel are two different things. So I can be positive and smile and try to encourage the people around me and customers to be safe, but in my mind there’s a part of me that is saying, ‘This is scary, this is some real stuff and you don’t want to walk in fear, live in fear, but this can be the turning point for us as Americans. And maybe I’m thinking like 'Ok what if this is our new norm? What if this becomes a thing that you have to stay conscious of.’ I think it’s a wake up call for us as a country.”
This interview has been condensed.