Be very different people for very different people

The shift starts in daylight and drizzle, and my first pick up is a middle-aged guy who needs multiple stops. The first one is a liquor store, and he's apologetic for the delay and distraught... because he has just, well, lost his mother. Also, he's going to his girlfriend's place, who has also recently, well, lost her mother. 

I do what I can to provide comfort; this is not the first time that I've had a passenger who is vocal about this stage of their grief. My passenger is grateful, tips me with cash that was dearly won, and I do what I can to shake it off.

Next passenger is a post-graduate political science major who attends Princeton University, and needs a ride from the Trenton train station to their off-campus housing. So we have a 20-minute-plus conversation based on the possible incompatibility of social media and true representative democracy, the dangers posed by deepfake technology and artificial intelligence, and other than whiplash levels of cognitive dissonance, we're rolling, we're good.

The entire rest of the shift is like that, because that's how the Rideshare Gods roll sometimes. Chatty foreign national, funny blue-collar waitress, earnest and articulate boarding school student, retiring account executive on a long airport run, and so on, and so on. Shifts like these are rare, lucrative, and cinematic enough to seem more than a little unreal... but if you do the job often enough, they happen. Especially if you can get folks talking.