Filling time: Lisbon’s tuk tuk guides waiting out the winter

Idle time within work hours, which is given over to waiting, has become responsibilized. As such, it constitutes a terrain upon which workers have to prove themselves in terms of their capacity to make meaningful use of this time. Their self-worth and self-esteem hinge on their success therein. The low exchange value of work is mediated, thereby, by the values with which workers manage to imbue their downtime. I will demonstrate this through my ethnography of Lisbon’s tuk tuk guides during the winter low season. Scaling down from theories of waiting and idle time to illustrate some of the realities of work in contemporary Lisbon, I will then scale up from the reported feelings (primarily boredom and anxiety) that this waiting invokes to the commentary these feelings entail regarding the same realities.