You Knew What I Was When You Picked Me Up

This Is How It Works

There's an old classic Aesop's fable about the frog and scorpion. In it, a frog is crossing a dangerous river when he sees a scorpion that's unable to progress, and in risk for his life. The scorpion asks for passage on the frog's back. The frog initially refuses for fear that the scorpion will sting him, but the scorpion assures him this will not happen, because to sting him would doom them both. The frog agrees, and allows the scorpion to ride on his back.

They progress, but before they can reach safety on the other side, the scorpion strikes. As they start to both sink to the bottom, the frog asks the scorpion why. To which the scorpion replies that it is his nature, and that the frog knew what the scorpion was when he picked him up.

I never thought this fable would play out in real life for me, and yet... 

Uber is running a promotion for number of rides completed, as part of their goal to get all of my business away from Lyft. (Side note: it seems to be working.) They let you choose which level of ride goal you are going after, and I had a bunch of calls and other plans that was going to completely wipe out last Friday. So to get close to my weekly goal, I chose the most aggressive number and committed to four hard days of max app time to get to the goal.

Because the Rideshare Gods enjoy trickster behavior, this resulted in less demand than usual. So I was about a half dozen rides from getting the threshold with less and less time available when I get a ping. Shared ride, 1 passenger, 5 minutes away. Let's do this, and if I get lucky and get another rider, that's a bigger win. Fatigue be damned.

I roll up to the pick up spot, and out walks a woman with a baby in a car seat. Which means two passenger slots, not one. I ask her if she can adjust the count, and she tells me the app didn't let her. Which is obviously and transparently bullspit, but I'm already counting the minutes until I can get her out of my life and on to the next fare.

Which is when the guy also comes out of the car, and asks if we can stop at a convenience store along the way.

What happens next is a bottle that gets forgotten, a return to the house, a ping from another rider while I'm waiting for the dude to get out of the convenience store, and a face to face cancel on the other rider, because they have two people, and I can't take them with one person becoming three in my back seat.

Oh, and then the woman gets nasty on me and threatens my rating, because I could have just not taken the ride when I picked her up.

No, seriously.

Frog and scorpion, folks. Played out in real time because the Rideshare Gods, in addition to being tricksters, seem to have a taste for the classics...