It Was The Best Of Rides, It Was The Worst Of Rides

Not, to my knowledge, a rideshare driver

I'm doing the hustle on a Saturday night, and trying to stay close to my home base because it's cold and dark and such. Besides, there are no big surge prices going on, so I might as well be in the area where I know all of the traffic patterns and where the decent public bathrooms are.

This gets me a ride from one of the best hotels in Princeton, going south, a little after midnight. The couple endures a long wait as I got the ping 20 minutes away during Destination Mode, so I apologize for the delay while I'm doing my usual water, mints and cough drops routine. They have no issues with it, and with the vibe that conversation is encouraged, I ask what brought them to Princeton.

The answer is a wedding, a friend of the bride's that she reconnected with from childhood thanks to social media, and they were struck by just how great the event was. This leads me to bring up my wedding bona fides, in that my spouse is a music professonal that has played hundreds of them. It turns out that the couple is married for ten years, she's a sixth-grade English teacher and he's a clinical psychologist who specializes on people working on subtance abuse addiction.

We had a great conversation, told our meet-cute spouse stories, got philosohical about ways to reach children who have to acccept revisions as part of the creative cycle, and so on. Honestly, one of the top 0.1% of rides I've ever given, and as the cherry on top, they tipped on the app. (Yes, we do know who does that and who doesn't.) When I left, I was significantly closer to my revenue goal for the night, and genuinely happy to have had the experience to provide a service to them.

For this, I made $26.03. Five dollar tip.

An hour later, I'm still more south and away from any surge areas, in a part of Mount Laurel I haven't been in so much. I get a ping that promises to take me 15 minutes north, so I'm in. The pick up is at Top Golf, a super-neon entertainment complex that is, frankly, usually trouble. You get badly drunk people here, in that they tend to overdo things, and they have enough cash to look down on my battered small Honda. But a ping is a ping, so here I am.

The pick up is for a guy, who gets in the back seat with his girl, who sits in the middle and leaves the door open, despite the extreme cold weather. They are doing this because they want to make sure I can't leave without the rest of their party, which turns out to be a big bearded guy who barely fits in the back seat, and the final member of the troupe; his girlfriend.

She's a woman having some combination of nervous breakdown, Tourette's level profanity spree, and frequent threats of suicide, intermixed with gasping and breathing fits that sounds like she's going to die. She's in the front seat, and has zero filter or care that she's acting like this in front of a total stranger.

 She's ten pounds of terrifying in a five pound bag, basically.

So I'm outnumbered, outsized and way out-crazied, and I get to take these folks 16 minutes and 10 miles up the road. Normally I insist on having a front seat passenger click their seat belt, because it's the law and my car beep at me a lot, but there was not a moment during this entire ride where she wasn't either screaming profanities, threatening to kill herself by jumping out of the car (I put the child locks on withouth anyone noticing) or hyperventilating in a way that made me think she was close to vomiting. Her boyfriend decided to answer her abuse with sarcasm and belittlement, and the other two in the back kept engaging him in idle conversation or asking me to turn up the music louder as if there was any way to ignore this person in these quarters.

Now, I've had folks in my life in bad emotional states. I've often manged to be a resource in these situations, to be able to talk to them, give them support and help them get to a calmer and better emotional state.

But this woman... I don't know her, I'm never going to see her again in my life, and I have no idea if engaging in her would have resulted in some kind of physical altercation or her just seizing the wheel and trying to take us all out with her.

So instead, I was as silent as the grave, got them to their location, and drove away.

I also gave them one star, because the app does not let you give someone zero stars. For the base reason of being responsible to other drivers, none of whom should have to endure this kind of display and callousness... and at the end of my shift, noted with the kind of "Of Course" shrug that you get when terrible people do terrible things, I found that I had a fresh one star rating of my own, with seven complaints about every aspect of the ride that a passenger can rank, some of which have never been ranked badly in the previous 15K or so rides I've given.

(Note: I had no complaints before this ride, so, yeah, pretty sure it was them. Also, since my ranking went down from 4.91 to 4.9 after this, I can take the hit.)

For this, I made $10.14. No tip.

The trick as a rideshare driver is, honestly, trying to remember the first ride in this blog post as much as you remember the second.

But saying you should do that and actually doing that are two different things...