A Drive Best Served with Cringe

 The pick up is suburban with a driveway, so I pull in. My passenger isn't waiting for me, so I k-turn and wait, and catch up on email. A few minutes later, my guy appears at the door and asks for assistance, as he's using a walker. I pop out, try and fail to fold down the device, and eventually just fold down the back seats of the hatchback and put him in the front seat. This is also where I'm getting a whiff of unwell about him, but the job is like that sometimes, and the drop off at a supermarket isn't too far away. Forward.

Since he's in the front seat, small talk is more likely, and I like the shifts where that happens more than the ones where it doesn't. I ask him if he's been in the area long, which is usually my entry into restaurant recommendations and the like, when he replies with something I wasn't anticipating. "No, I'm from Trenton, and I'm homeless."

I offer condolences before a particularly awkward silence, which he eventually ends with, "It's my cousin's fault."

Having nothing to add to this, we drive in silence for another half a minute, as I wonder if turning up music would be a little too obvious. Before I can decide, he adds, "It's OK. I will have my revenge."

Which somehow prompts me to reply, "Well, you know what they say, the best revenge is a life well lived..." 

Which doesn't seem terribly helpful to a person who is, well, homeless. 

He doesn't say anything the rest of the way, and neither do I...

The app is a snitch

 In the last month or so, Lyft has started giving me little tidbits about passengers before I accept the ride. "Has tipped on 72% of rides." "Is usually waiting for the driver." "You gave them 5 stars last time."

My guess is that this is all I being done to nudge drivers into taking a higher percentage of rides (while, of course, paying less for those rides, because Enshittification Is Everything Now)... but the reality is that the passengers who behave worse than others are going to find themselves in a spiral of worse service.

And while that seems fine and justified on some level, on another... no. 

Not to get too philosophical about this, but no one is 100% of anything. Some of the worst rated passengers I've ever had turned out to be just fine, but were victimized by a past driver. Some of the best rated passengers seem to get there purely from the power of buying their way out of bad behavior. 

There's also this: judge not, lest ye be judged. Ridesharing is something of a microcosm of society on this, where rating every experience is somewhere on the spectrum of useless because AI slop and disregarding, or hyper-vigilance since the rating can end your income. 

Meanwhile, this: both apps are now doing full-blown invasive telemetrics to determine how "good" of a driver you are. This is determined by harsh braking, speeding, etc. But here's a spoiler on that... if I really want my harsh braking scores to go down, it's easy. I just drive later in the day, when there is less traffic to inspire harsh braking. Or I run more yellow to red lights, since the app isn't bright enough to understand when protecting myself from tickets and collisions is the cause, rather than aggro tailgating and unsafe driving.

This is all, of course, a beta tech problem, and eventually the data will catch up and course correct, but in the meantime?

Everyone probably just needs to give each other a break. 

If a passenger is a little late, stinky or unpolite, I need to chalk it up to the rest of their day, and not a need to punch down on the driver. If your ride isn't quite to your preference (depending on the passenger, I'm either too slow, fast, chatty or robotic)... maybe look in the mirror and question the importance of the complaint.

Or why, exactly, we want to live in a surveliiance state in the first place.