by Tara Sottile
We see them in every skyscraper in Toronto: security guards. Right now, they’re often the only people left working in the massive buildings. 30-year-old Mitchell Whiteman from Oshawa Ont. is one of them. He is a security guard at the Bay and Adelaide center.
He talked to me about the changes and impact COVID-19 has had on his job.
Can you describe how busy your building is now because of COVID-19?
It is a ghost town. So, I can give you numbers actually, because I just had to run a card swipe report the other day. So, on average we used to have, in terms of just cards needing to be swiped to go up and down in elevators…we used to have something around 4,500 but now it’s only a couple hundred a day. Total traffic amount in the building if you're including the path [and] everything else, we were probably well into like almost 7,000 constantly walking through all day because we have everybody from Hudson's Bay.
Have you had any positive cases in the buildings you work in?
So, it's been kind of crazy because we had had some positive cases in our building. But what the property does, how it works is once we find out, they've been notifying us immediately, so that we all know and essentially, they're telling us just to stay away from the floor, even if it's a presumptive. They're still telling us [to] stay away from the floor, then they're bringing in third party cleaning companies, things like that to help sanitize the floor. But the thing is, even though it's sanitized, they don't let us back up there until a week after it's been sanitized and the regular cleaning has continued throughout that week as well. So, after the week is done, they're letting us go back up, which is great and I absolutely love them for that.
What kinds of safety precautions have you put in place at your work?
So, what we've done is we've done a soft lockdown. So, essentially what that includes is all of our perimeter doors have essentially been locked, except for one in each tower because we have two high rise towers right now. So, that one door that's left open is right beside the desks so that the individuals at the desk can essentially assess people as they come through. We're trying to keep just tenants. We also have the cleaners in the building. They brought on extra staff to just clean surfaces like literally all they do is they do a rotation, they'll go and wipe every single handle, every single elevator button, things like that from the upstairs floors all the way down to our security areas. And they just do that loop for like the whole eight hours.
What kind of impact has this had on your mental health?
I’m exhausted every day. Eight hours of sleep is not enough, I wake up and I'm just like I want to go back to sleep. And for the first few hours at work, I'm drinking so much more coffee than I used to just to like jog my brain awake. On the weekends, I’m just slouching around like I'm a sloth. I have so many things I want to do and just as soon as I lay down, I'm like I don't even want to move. I just want to sleep. I'm just like, it's a lot. I'm finally getting a little more of a balance on it but I'll be honest, it has been a lot because it's stressful, right? Because I mean, I got my own personal stuff that I want to be dealing with but trying to manage with so many different people.
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