February 26th

Today for the first time ever I gave my Bolt driver a one-star rating. I would have given a zero or even a negative stars if that would be possible. Honestly, I don’t remember giving a rating that low for anything or any service but today that driver earned it.

He picked me up after work when there was a shift change and a lot of people were leaving. He asked me if my company was owned by Polish or foreign money. I told him that company is Swedish, and then he told me “I am not a nationalist, but I hate all that foreign scum” (he used the word “ścierwo” and I am not sure how to translate it into English)

I don’t know if he was talking about owners of my company or people who were leaving (and we employ a lot of Ukrainians and Belarusians). But it does not matter, who starts a conversation with a stranger like that? I still have some of my paranoia and started to think that maybe I look like a neo-Nazi or a two bit polish fascist, so maybe he felt comfortable saying that to me? Nah, I don’t, maybe when I shaved my head… No, not possible. He just thought that this is a normal thing to say. Where the hell those people come from? How thick one has to be to have that kind of views? The xenophobia is alive and well in Poland. I mean it’s a problem everywhere but in Poland there is a long history of that. And history of pogroms and antisemitism and racism and homophobia (that I experienced first hand when I marched in the first LGBT pride march in Bialystok in 2019 and got hit be a bottle and spat on by fucking morons in Jagiellonia soccer shirts). I have a little hope that those prejudices will ever change.

Also, he drove like a maniac, I almost got motion sickness which I never do, and stopped to get gas along the way and broke numerous traffic laws. So an easy one-star rating for the fucking idiot.