A ride with perspective

Stop 1

The pickup comes at a supermarket that’s hood-adjacent and is always a good source for quick trips. I’m chasing down a number of rides to qualify for a bonus. It’s a Sunday afternoon. I’m not on empathy auto-pilot, but it’s a near thing. Weekends are when I do the majority of the work now, and after 2-3 days of mostly full shifts, my body hurts and my outlook is not great. I’m just grinding through it.

My pickup also has a stop. Not for nothing but stops generally stink for the driver. We make about a third of the money for waiting as we do for moving, parking spots are not always available or legal, this does nothing to help me complete the rides completed bonus, and so on. Not a fan. But I can’t avoid rides with stops, at least not usually, and the total ride length estimate is within tolerance levels. Let’s do this.

My guy is ready when I get there, which is not always the case at this supermarket or this neighborhood, and a serious plus. He’s a high school student, chatty, and he’s got a small bouquet of flowers from the supermarket in his hands. Aw, sweet. Maybe the stop is for his beloved. He listens to my spiel about amenities, confirms the address, and we’re off.

I don’t recognize the address, but that’s not a big issue, until we get to it. It’s… the cemetery.

It turns out that he comes here every week to visit the grave of his younger brother, who died after a long fight with cancer, last year.

We creep along small paths until we get close, and he hops out of the car to have a conversation that I, mercifully, can not hear. He takes all the time he needs. I check my email and social media, as if this was just another ride with a stop, and don’t otherwise do anything, because the last thing I want to do is (a) hurry him along, or (b) make him feel self-conscious. He needs a ride, not an unrequested and ham-handed attempt at therapy.

He pops back in the car after a few more minutes. I take him to his next stop, close out the ride, and wish him well.

And go back to doing the job, having scratched off one more unique use of ride share off my card.

With a fresh understanding that the problem of getting enough rides to qualify for a bonus isn’t that big of a problem, really.

My iPod remains psychic and disturbing

Not listed: omniscience

The pick up is for a passenger with a relatively low rating. To be honest, I rarely pay much attention to customer ratings, because there usually isn't a ton of time or predictive measure to it... but if you make me wait, I'm checking. Hmm. Lower than usual. 

They get in and I immediately get why the rating is low; there's an out of state drop off address. An out of state address, unless it comes with a tip or surge price, is a loss for the driver. There's just dead time to get back to the home state, and if the passenger doesn't make up for it, there's a hard temptation to get 3-star them, especially if they are someone you might see again. The area that I'm going to also has bad lighting and roads; we are well on our way to a 3-star trip. My passenger also takes some time to get in the car, and we're off.

Conversation doesn't happen, but neither does playing their own audio without headphones, or a phone call, so I'm still on the fence about my star rating. Which is when my prophetic iPod chimes in with this little ditty.

I spend the next three minutes fighting back a giggle, the urge to check my rear view mirror to see if the song is having an impact, and the temptation to turn up the lyrics to give away the game. The passenger gets to their drop point, leaves without a word or sideways glance, and I wonder if they even heard the song. Probably not, and probably for the best...

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. 

Let's just wait this out

One-way single lane road in a bad part of town. It's late at night, and my pick up is a block away.
Likely one of my last rides of the night.

Problem: can't get to them.

Reason why: a couple is having a police-level argument. 

The man of this is in a beat up old minivan. He's trying to load in a couple of bags into the car while having a screaming match with the woman. She is screaming loud enough to be heard in my car, a good 40 to 50 feet away, and punctuating her points by throwing bottles against the side of the van. He tries to respond in kind with throwing bags at the door, so there is a tactical battle going on to see who can get in the more vocal insult and artillery. 

Meanwhile, time passes. There is no safe way to put int into reverse on a one-way street, as I'd be backing up for a solid 2-3 minutes, and making myself conspicuous. 

Besides, they can't just keep doing this, can they? I mean, they are going to run out of stuff to throw at each other. And neither of them is showing any interest in getting close enough to throw hands. I'm also the wrong size, demographic and am not making nearly enough doing this to get out of my car and try to play peacemaker.

Several more minutes pass, and my man finally grumps off, his windows miraculously intact. Either that, or his beloved wasn't angry enough to aim high, and only wanted to dent the minivan. Who knows what the heart wants, really.

I pick up my passenger, drive him to another great place, turn off the app and go home. All while trying to practice gratitude that it didn't get worse, and that I've never been in a big enough argument to engage in traffic-stopping artillery in public. 

Moving on...

You've got to have fear in your heart

Strip mall in west Trenton, three hours into the shift, late for a weeknight but not late. No one's talking, no one's tipping, no one's paying surge price. It's been like this for most of the week, because the Eagles lost the Super Bowl and the region is depressed. Also, it's February. Get in the car, stare at your phone, and make sure your driver is making as little as possible. Not great.

The pick up is two young women, 15 minute ride to a local college. College kids are usually better than most. They want to know how to save time and money on rides, they are a little better at holding a conversation, they tip more often. So I force myself to be a little chattier than usual, try to engage. They respond just enough to make me feel bad for trying, and as the car gets quiet for the final 2/3rds of the ride as they pray to their phones, this track comes up on my iPod. Specifically, the last few minutes of it.

You've got to have fear in your heart / you've got to have fear in your heart...

Have I offended my passengers? Are they going to be the ones that decide to 1-star me, make some specious accusation, or worse? I've been doing this off and on for six years now, over 25K rides. Eventually, you are going to run into some significant problem of a person. Maybe these are the ones.

I roll up to their drop point. They exit cheerfully and politely. Nothing that was going on in my head or the soundtrack was real.

This time.