Deep Diving

Gina Gallhager is a pharmacy technician and a barista. In her typical day, she deals with both the morning rush of customers at Dunkin’ and the afternoon rush of patients at CVS. Since the pandemic reached the United States, she has grown increasingly upset with the behavior of customers at both of her jobs. At Dunkin’ she sees many customers who are leaving quarantine just to buy coffee – something which frustrates her because “[customers] really should be staying home” in order to slow the spread of the virus. While she empathises with their boredom, if she were in their shoes, she would rather “go insane than either get myself or someone else sick”. On the other hand, while working at the pharmacy, Gina finds that customers are more belligerent. She has had to deal with customers telling her that they have COVID as they leave and drive through customers demanding that she “go grab milk” and other items, “screaming” at her when she refuses, along with other previously unimaginable behavior from customers. She wishes that customers “would realize that I’m human and I want to be treated like a human”. Her greatest source of stress, however, is fear of passing COVID-19 to her mother. Her mother has an autoimmune disease and is in remission from cancer, and Gina is “petrified of just one day, like, someone I don’t know has [COVID-19] and I don’t know about it and then I bring it home and she ends up getting it and ends up getting seriously hurt because of it. Like, I don’t want to be the one to hurt my mom”.