This week I'm on early shift. So perhaps I should have set the alarm for bedtime when I "only briefly" logged in to Journaly last night. I'm rarely awakened by a buzzer, because I don't like them and normally I'm an early bird, but this morning... Well, the alarm clock went off and then I went back to sleep.

Oh, shit! Overslept! In ten minutes I have to be on my way!

In the nick of time I reach for my first customer. He goes to an Alzheimer's group. Ten years younger than me! But despite of my weeping heart, it's a marvellous tour. I only have to act as chaperon, for he not going astray. And he's very nice. Yet again I think of what we've been told during our apprenticeship, about people with dementia. How problematic they are - doing weird things, getting aggressive, running away... Again what I'm experiencing instead is a friendly person who's just a little forgetful. Well, and one of them was so forgetful that he didn't find the way out of his apartment without help!

After the first order, there's time for a break. I grab a coffee at the first bakery on my way. (In Germany you can buy hot coffee in bakeries and some other shops.)

"Do you have any vegan breakfast?" I ask.

"Nothing" the saleslady looks determined.

"Aren't even the bread rolls vegan?"

"No." Looks as if she wouldn't sell me a carrot if she has to admit that it's a vegan carrot. I know that there are vegans who say that bread might be non-vegan if it's not labeled as vegan (what mostly doubles the price). They told me in a video that the baking tray might be greased with butter. Well, very unlikely in my opinion if you don't buy your bread in a deli - for purely economic reasons. There are cheaper ways to prevent the rolls from sticking to the tin. But I'm not hungry enough to quibble.

When she tells me the price of the coffee, I look shocked.

"Best quality", she says, "from Austria."

"Oh", I marvel, "I didn't know that they grow coffee in Austria."

"It doesn't matter where the coffee is grown", she says, "it matters where the company is registered."

I can be a bitch, too. "It matters how the workers are living, and what they're paid."

I ask for a cup, but she doesn't give me one and tells me that I have to drink the coffee at least 50 metres away because of Covid. No doubt that this is true. The bureaucrats have enacted every ordinance to make it difficult for us to have a break. It even has become difficult to find a toilet.

But they allow me to work all day in the local public transport, with alternating customers at my side, in most cases with linked arms to protect them from falling, and in buses and metros that are allowed to be crammed with up to four people per square metre!

No wonder that the ordinances don't work so well. On my way to the next customer I start writing this post for Journaly, but I don't finish it that day and I leave it lying about for some days, not knowing how to go on with it and how to end. But there's one thing I did in that time: I signed a petition: #NoCovid!