What I think, but do not reply

The ping comes in for a pickup at the train station, and I'm about 10 minutes away. A woman's name in all caps with a lower than usual rating has some yellow flags on it, but I need to bump my acceptance numbers and business is always light after the New Year. I accept the ride and start to make my way to the pick up.

Two minutes later, there's a text from the passenger. "I AM WAITING"

And yes, a kind reply would be to assume age, or newness to the platform, or that she just pressed send too fast and was going to give a location next. 

But kindness is not where my inner (inner?) hack comedy writer lives, so I consider the following replies...

OH NOOO NOT THAT

Teleportation costs extra

I AM DRIVING

Tragic

Enjoy that

And record a voice note to my snarky family looking for other options, all while continuing to make my way to the pickup.

She cancels a minute later, adding a few bucks to the day's take. And, of course, the memories...

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.

Rider Behavior

It's quarter to three in the morning, and I'm about $20 away from hitting the daily goal. It's been a busy shift, but not a very lucrative one, so it's been a long day. I get a ping in Princeton for a 20 minute ride south, no surge, that will get me fairly close to goal and home. Maybe even goal with a tip. Hope springs eternal.

The location is near a hotel, but the avatar that denotes the location of the passenger's phone isn't there. It's at a spur road off Route 1, about a tenth of a mile away. I drive to the avatar, pull over to the side, hit the hazards and roll down the window. It's not a particularly safe spot to stop, but the world works differently in the middle of the night for drunk people, and you accommodate from past experience.

My presumed fare is sitting off the side of the road against a property fence, some 100 feet away, and inconsolable. Appears to be a white woman, likely college age. Her companion, similar age male, who I presume called for the Uber on her phone, tells her the Uber is here. She won't move, won't stand, demands her phone, and screams about a person who has, in her opinion, shown herself not to be her friend due to her actions. It's very much a raging fit, at a volume that doesn't bode well.

He pulls out his own phone, calls someone else, tells them she won't get in the car. 

This lathers, rinses and repeats for several minutes.

What I want to tell her, but will not because esoteric and off-putting, is that every person on the earth is descended from a very small group of humans who refused to die after a massive volcanic eruption killed all but a few hundred of us, huddling in caves for years, starving and scared, until it was safe to go one.

What I want to say, but will not because rude, is that I am doing a job, and until you get in the car, I am doing it for free. At a time when I can not do jobs for free, obviously, because I'm out in the middle of the night, by the side of the road, waiting for someone to stand up and get into a car.

What I want to do, but will not because not my place, is tell her that when you make your problems the problems of other people (let alone complete strangers and professional service workers)... that's a tell. About your boundaries, your empathy, your competence, your privilege. It's not a good tell.

I've waited three minutes. If I wait another two with her not getting in the car before I cancel the ride, I get a little less than four dollars. And if she actually gets up and gets in the car during this time, I get 20 more minutes of this, for no surge price, and likely no tip.

I check the app. There's surge price nearby. 

The first rule of rideshare is a simple one: get home safe. I

The second rule of rideshare is also simple: we are doing this for money. A ticket from a cop for stopping here would ruin the entire day of work, or more. Not driving a fare at this hour, when fares are scarce, is also not advisable. Let alone fares that might pay surge price, or, well, get in the car.

I check the app for cancellation reasons. Here's the one: rider behavior. I cancel the ride, drive away, as the male yells for me not to. Surge price is activated, but no other requests come for the next 20 minutes, and I call it a night, resolving to...

Work a little more the next day to cover the shortfall.

Which I should be doing now, instead of writing this.

Forward. Honoring the stubborn ancestors.

Somehow, I did not believe Royal Rich

 The pick up is in New Brunswick, middle of the day, senior living building. An older gentleman with a walker makes his way to the car. It turns out that I'm taking him a casino about 45 minutes south in another state, so I make a little conversation. His game is poker, which I also play. We discuss various rooms in the area and what he likes and doesn't like about the game, and I give him the usual tips on saving a few bucks on rideshare rides, and why the price keeps changing and getting worse for him.

During the ride, he mentions how, in the room he's about to go play, he once got Royal Flushes in Texas Hold-Em on consecutive hands, and that ever since that blessed day, he's been called Royal Rich by the dealers there.

Now, the odds of hitting a royal are something like 650K to 1, and in decades of play, I've seen two live. Paid one, hit the other. Two in a row, according to the Internet query I just made while writing this post, are 422 trillion to one. But he's insistent, 82, and the passenger. Who am I to tell him he's wrong?

I drop him at his preferred spot and he tells me... the tip will be in the app.

There is, of course, no tip later. But you already knew that, yes?