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A Different Kind of Cancel Culture: 10 Reasons Why Drivers Cancel Rides
I may also play Steely Dan |
The fact of the matter is that I am 100% certain that I've inspired this same conversation for other drivers.
Practicing Gratitude: A Really Good Shift
Last night, I'm working a few hours with the goal of getting clear by 9pm, so I can take a few hours off and watch the NBA Finals game. Lyft had a 3 for $18 streak starting at 7pm. Exactly at that time, as I'm heading south on Route 1 outside of Princeton, I turn on the ap. With luck, I'll bang out 3, have a decent hour, then turn it off and head back.
Boom, boom, boom. Three short rides with three pleasant people later, with two of them tipping, I've made $37 in 30 minutes, which is to say, about as much as you can ever hope to make on this, absent a spectacular tipping moment. (I've had a couple of people in the course of 22K rides who gave me $100. More of that, please.)
More importantly, I've done so fast enough to double up on the streak bonus... but now I'm at risk of missing the game. Roll the dice.
The next three are longer and don't tip (less than 10% of passengers do, and this is a 5+ year data set)... but finishes the run 10 minutes from my house, 15 minutes before the game starts. I gassed up the car, made myself a sandwich and watched the game.
Gratitude! (Also, go Warriors.)
When The App Cheats
As a driver, I've learned through trial and error that trusting the ap to get you paid the most is an express route to leaving money on the table. If you just turn on the ap and take everything that comes your way, you'll have great ratings and poor per hour returns. As my family can not eat my ratings, yeah, I don't much care about them any more. I keep them above the minimum on the number of rides accepted and canceled, and I keep my passengers happy. I'm platinum status on both platforms as I type this.
So instead of just leaving the ap on when driving the current fare, I switch on last ride as often as possible. It's the only way to keep Lyft from piling on random fares in any direction, and the only way to keep Uber from giving me non-surge pricing from some distant area. It's how the game is played. It also helps to keep me in the areas where I feel comfortable driving, because I know where the potholes are, where the speed traps are, where I can find a clean bathroom, and so forth. If you take me to an unfamiliar area, I take you there, and then I go the hell back to my home area ASAP. Again, trial and error.
So when you are out of the ap, you see a map of the area that has surge pricing areas, if any are firing. If you are close enough to get to one, you should, because if you do the job without surge pricing, you make less. A *lot* less.
These surge prices can change every 15 to 30 seconds during busy times, or if you are having phone connection issues. It leads to a lot of hey, that's not the surge price I was expecting, and as soon as you get that next fare for less than what was advertised seconds ago...
Well, you can Like It or you can Lump It, but you are still doing the job if you want to stay in the platform. (Oh, and Uber is especially "good" at this, with half or a third of the advertised price coming your way if you are just a few hundred feet away from the dollar amount when you re-enter the driver pool. Needless to say, this also doesn't really do much for the safety of driving while in the app, but after 10K hours in both aps and +22.5K fares, I'm safe enough. So far.)
Tonight, I was just about to flip on Uber in a $19 surge area... and the zone just melted away entirely as my finger was over the button. I rebooted my phone, because that sometimes works, and the surge was still gone... but hey, just drive a few more miles down the road, because it's $11 there. Or turn on Lyft for $4 extra and...
I just shut my phone off and drove the hell home, because on that day I could.
Tomorrow or next week, not sure.
So if you're wondering why there aren't any drivers, ask yourself this question:
If your compensation for working was this arbitrary, would you want to do it?
The Clubhouse Leader For Worst Fare Of The Year
Near Asshats |
Recently, I was trying to qualify for an Uber bonus on rides given, and the app was not cooperating at all. Nothing but long rides from a long distance away, and the shift is working about half of the effectiveness of when it's good. Some days you get the bear and such. The final indignity is a ride that's 9 minutes away, going 31 minutes east, out into Red Country, away from any kind of surge price or utility. Oh well, nothing to be done about it; I can't afford the cancel. Let's just get it over with.
My pick up is bad from the start, with delays before leaving. The passenger is an older woman, and we're waiting on a bigger guy, presumably her husband. I tell them about the amenities (hand sanitizer and water), and we're off.
I've cracked the windows, as it's in the mid'60s and beautiful outside. As we get on the highway, the guy asks me to close the windows, as he's cold. I do this (by the way, he could have closed the windows himself; I don't use the child safety controls)... and a minute later, he's asking me to turn up the air conditioning, as he's hot.
Yeah. Wonderful. 15 minutes to go until I three star him and stop doing this for the night.
A few minutes later, they've exhausted conversation with each other and decide to come back to me, despite my absolute silence towards them (and cracked driver-side window). Not too surprisingly, my choice of wearing a mask seems to personally offend this lovely human being. After a paragraph of profanity about how something that's killed over a million Americans (and counting) is all bullshit, I respond with the thing that really should just shut anyone up.
"Sir, my wife is high risk. I wear a mask to keep her safe."
Now, my reason to wear a mask is, in all candor, NONE OF HIS GODDAMNED BUSINESS. But this reason is in fact true, and while it's not the entire reason (I also wear it so that, um, I don't get the goddamned disease myself, and I wear it to make the more educated and sane and tip-likely of my passengers to be comfortable)... it's the biggest reason. I don't know about you, but if I knew that I gave someone a disease, I'd feel bad about it. Don't want to feel bad. So I wear a mask.
This buys me about ten seconds of silence. Then the asshat asks me, sarcastically, if I *like* wearing a mask. Like he's trying to provoke a fight, or imply that I've got some kind of fetish.
It's 2am and we're in the middle of nowhere New Jersey. I know there aren't other cars out here; you'd have to be a crazy person to do rideshare in this area, at this hour. This escalates if I pull over and tell these two to get the eff out of my car.
So I grit my teeth and drive. They later ask me where I live, as if I want to share that information with them, or they just want to get more data for their Some Liberal Drove Us Home fantasy. Since it's where their pick up was, I tell them. I drive them into their specific driveway, and I can tell from their tone as I do this that they have no idea just how close they were to me just pulling over and walking away.
Oh, and because you already knew this... Trump bumper stickers on the cars in the driveway.
There's a culture war in this country, folks.
You can try not to fight in it if you like.
But that doesn't mean the other side won't fight you for it anyway.
For Scarlett, and her mother
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