The child is gone

Photo: from the movie “The child is gone” by Kostas Gerabinis

PRINTED EDITION

03.10.2021, 16:54 ()

Pavlos Methenitis

The first postmen, the first postmen, the couriers, that is who ran, who hurried to deliver the messages of kings and officials, are as old as the writing itself.

“And I dream at night that this old duck is flying / in the skies / and a voice over the city is singing / It is gone! The child is gone! ”

This is how Themos Skandamis sang, chanting the anthem of the ubiquitous couriers and deliverers, the children with the motorbikes, who bring us rain and snow in skewers at home or in the office commercial correspondence.

They are the couriers, ie the couriers, they are the delivery, the couriers, but also the external employees with a bicycle, they are generally the working bicycle drivers.

They are the ones who risk their meticulousness or even their life for a day job of terror, literally, since the biosphere of the urban streets of our country it is self-dystopian. They are the ones who do the duel Omonia – Kifissia in eighteen minutes with the clock at rush hour, to arrive on time the architectural plans or contracts in the company, because the customer is good and urgent, as the boss barks on the phone. ). violating the red lights so we can still eat hot pizza in the Champions League. They are the ones who, when they return home, shocked by the eight-hour or ten-hour drive, see the water in the bathtub turn black from the exhaust gases and slime that they collected during all these hours in traffic.

They are the ones who get two or four euros an hour, waiting for the potions to make an elementary per diem, are those who if they are lucky, are employees with corporate motorbike, insurance, licenses and gifts, only instead of five stamps per week the boss, if good, sticks three, when the bad bosses stick only one.

) , are obliged to return the Christmas Gift to the owner of the business.

They are the ones who sometimes leave their bones on the asphalt, so that we can drink our coffee hot and our beer cold, they are the ones who do the motorcycles. constantly holding the horn to give them importance, when they claim normal work, heavy and unhealthy badges, when they shout for Personal Protection Measures, such as helmets, compensation for damage to their own motorcycles or company motorcycles, properly maintained and not for reasons . They are the ones who feel sorry for your soul when they weave their paths in the urban fabric with forty degrees in the shade in Acharnon at noon or with minus five on the icy streets of snow-covered Filothei at midnight.

etymological and historical generation. The English word “delivery” (delivery) comes from the medieval English verb “delivree” and means the act of freeing one of his bonds.

The meaning of childbirth, the word received the word from the end of the 16th century, while the meaning of the expression, the statement (“Deliver a speech” means “deliver a speech”), as well as that of hitting, throwing and consequently distribution from the beginning of the 18th century. The courier got its name from the late medieval English term “courier”, from the “coreor” of the old French, an evolution of “courier”, which also comes from the Italian verb “corriere”, originating from the Latin “currere” “, Which means” I run “.

The first postmen, the first postmen, the couriers, that is, those who ran, who hurried to deliver the messages of kings and officials, are as old as the writing itself.

The first official state-organized shipping and delivery service texting was done in ancient Egypt. The pharaohs, already from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, used couriers, postmen, postmen to spread their decrees in the territory.

The Romans had a very organized postal network, founded in the years of Octavian Augustus (62 BC-14 AD. X.). It was called “cursus publicus” and was used for government correspondence. The service, which used fast chariots and slower towed oxen, continued during the years of the Byzantine Empire.

Also, the ancient Persians had established post offices (the “Sapar Kaneh”), in which the courier, the equestrian oracle (the “sapar”) delivered the letter to his colleague, who, on a resting horse, delivered it to the next station, until the letter reached its destination.

Herodotus had praised the efficiency of the service, but also the professionalism of the couriers, who quickly covered the distance allotted to them, without being frightened “by snow, rain, heat or darkness”.

Exactly in the ancient Persian model, with the cavalry couriers and the intermediate stations for horse change, the Americans Russell, Majors and Wendell founded in 1860 the famous post office or Pony Express, which for a price thousands of times higher than conventional mail was able to deliver a letter from the east coast of the United States to the Atlantic in the western Pacific, covering 4,500 kilometers in just 10 days, when the plain mail did months. The Pony Express became part of the Far West legend, perhaps because it lasted so short: the company went bankrupt after just 18 months of operation.

So these are the couriers, the deliverers, the outsiders, the kids on the motorbike, the professional riders, the guild descendants of the ancient Persian sapphire and cowboys in the Wild West, the human faces behind the helmet, who, too, imagine, have labor rights and individual dignity like all of us, who are impatient when pizza is late and call shop to hear that “the child is gone”, as Skandamis says: