The app takes the photo automatically when the driver marks it delivered, from the driver's own phone, at the door. Three of mine show my hallway, my coat hooks, and the front door shut.
I order too much takeaway. That is the honest opening and it is also why I have two hundred and fourteen delivery photos on one account.
Contactless delivery works like this. The driver arrives, puts the bag down, opens the app, and the app takes a photo. Not the driver choosing to photograph it: the app opens the camera as part of marking the order delivered, and it will not let them complete the step without one.
The photo goes into the order history with a timestamp. Mine are all there, going back to 2019.
They are all the same picture. My front step, the bag on it, the bottom half of my door, the edge of the pot with the dead lavender in it.
Three of them are not.
The first one was in the February of 2022.
I was upstairs. The notification came up, delivered, and I went down and the food was on the step and everything was completely ordinary.
I only looked at the photo because I was scrolling the order to check whether they had put the sauce in.
It is my hallway. Taken from about the middle of it, at chest height, looking towards the front door.
You can see my coat hooks on the left with three coats on them, the radiator, the bottom of the stairs on the right, the mat, and the front door.
The door is shut.
I want to explain why I did not delete the app and move house, because I have asked myself that a lot.
At first I assumed it was a picture from a different order, attached to mine by a bug. That is a completely reasonable thing for a piece of software to do, and it would mean the photo is somebody else's hallway.
It is not. The coats are my coats. One of them is a green parka with a torn pocket that I still have. The radiator has the same chip out of the paint on the left end. The mat is a mat I bought and threw away in 2023.
And you can see, through the little glazed panel in the front door, a shape that is the right shape and colour for a man standing on the step with something in his hand.
The second was in the November of 2023 and the third in the June of last year.
Same position, about the middle of the hallway, chest height, looking at the door.
The second one has the new mat in it.
The third one has the new mat and the parka gone, because I gave the parka away in the spring, and the hooks have my work bag on them instead, which is exactly what was on that hook that month.
Whatever takes these photos is up to date.
What I did in 2023, which was not nothing.
I contacted the app. It took four attempts to get past the automated help to a person, and the person was polite and out of their depth, and the answer after eleven days was that the photograph is captured on the courier device at the point of delivery and that they could see no anomaly in the order record.
I asked whether they could tell me the location the photo was taken at, because a phone tags a photo with GPS.
They said they do not retain that. I believe them. It is the kind of thing a company would rather not hold.
I asked for the courier's name for those three orders. They would not give it, which is correct.
What is not in the photos.
Me. I want to say that plainly because it is the first thing anybody asks.
I live on my own. I was in the house all three times, upstairs on two of them and in the kitchen on the third, and the kitchen is at the back and the hallway is not visible from it.
Nobody else has a key. The house was rekeyed in 2021 for an unrelated reason, which is that I lost mine in a car park.
There is no camera in my hallway. I have never had one. I did buy a doorbell camera in 2024, after the third one, and it points out, and the app that runs it is not the delivery app and has no access to anything.
The angle.
I have spent more time on this than on anything else in my life and it comes down to a measurement anybody could take.
The camera is about a metre and a half off the floor. I worked that out by standing in my hallway holding my own phone at different heights until the photo matched, which took an evening and a piece of masking tape on the wall, and it matches at about a metre forty five.
That is where a phone is if somebody of ordinary height is holding it up to take a picture.
The distance from the front door is about two and a half metres, which puts whoever it is level with the bottom step of the stairs.
And in all three, the focus is on the door. The hooks and the radiator are slightly soft and the door and its glazed panel are sharp, the way a phone focuses on whatever is in the middle of the frame.
Something in my hallway was looking at the front door and taking a photograph of it at the moment my food arrived.
I still order. That is the part I cannot defend and the part that makes this true, because if I had stopped ordering there would be nothing to write about.
What I do now is I go and stand in the hall before it arrives.
I get the notification that the driver is two minutes away and I go down and I stand about there, at the bottom of the stairs, and I wait, and when the bag goes down on the step I open the door straight away.
I have done that for about fourteen months and every photo since has been my front step and the pot with the dead lavender in it.
Two hundred and fourteen orders and two hundred and eleven of them are a picture of a doorstep.
I have thought about what it means that it stopped when I started standing there, and I have got two answers and I do not like either of them, and the one I have decided to live with is that I am in the way.