Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Best Voicemail Ever

Episode 26 in a series of true rideshare stories

It’s a quiet ride from a restaurant downtown to a house in the suburbs. She’s about my age, and we chitchat about the weather and the growth of the city. Potato chip conversations, you might call them—empty calories of human interaction that fill you up but don’t offer any lasting nutrition.

“Do you want to hear the best voicemail ever?” she asks suddenly.

“Sure,” I tell her, turning off the radio.

“It’s from my mom,” she says. “This was a few months after my dad died, and some of her work friends took her to Vegas.”

She gets out her phone, puts it on speaker, and the voice of an older woman babbles excitedly through a fog of inebriation.

“Madison! I’m at Caesars and it’s… there’s… I know it’s like… it’s late there, because it’s almost two here, so it’s… I don’t know… You’re probably asleep, I guess. We had a bunch of… Well… We went to Cirque du Soleil, but then we decided to have some drinks after, and everybody went to bed, but… Well… I guess you’re asleep. But call me when you get this...”

She rambles a little longer and I’m chuckling along with it, thinking it’s amusing to hear a woman calling her daughter and sounding like a college student who just discovered margaritas and doesn’t realize she’s barely coherent. It’s not the “best voicemail ever”, but it’s a little funny. I make eye contact with Madison through the rearview mirror and she is looking at me with that familiar expression that says, wait, it gets better.

And it does.

“Oh, whatever, I’ll just tell you over voicemail,” says the older woman’s voice. “They went to bed and I went into the casino and played some slots, and… Madison… I won! I hit the… I won two million dollars!”

Madison laughs behind me in the car, like she has listened to this a hundred times and she never gets tired of it. Which is probably exactly the case.

“Wait, what?!” I say.

“Right?”

“Is that real?”

“Yeah!”

“Your mom won two million dollars in Vegas?”

“After the taxes and stuff it was closer to one, but she paid off her house and retired a couple years early. She’s kinda set.””

Long after I’ve dropped off Madison, the voicemail continues to bounce around my head.

Every movie set in Vegas has a scene where an extra is winning big, and I’m sure I’ve seen videos of it happening for real. I’ve been to Vegas a lot of times, and I’ve probably even been in line for a buffet while somebody’s life changed a couple hundred feet from me, though if I have seen it happen, I don’t really recall it. It’s funny how even the smallest brush with the actual human being, a few minutes of conversation with her daughter and the sound of excitement in her recorded voice, makes it real in a way that it otherwise isn’t. You might smile when you see that person leap up in the casino and start weeping with joy, but much like in a Vegas movie, that person is usually just an extra. A few minutes speaking to someone whose life was touched by the experience, even indirectly, makes it hit a little deeper.

I keep imagining this woman telling her coworkers the next morning at breakfast. Did she invite them to play the slots with her and they declined? Did they warn her that nobody ever wins, and she went anyway? I make up stories in my head, about her flying the whole group to Vegas the next year, making a tradition out of watching Cirque du Soleil and then hitting the slots. The joy is contagious.

Madison called it “the best voicemail ever.” It’s certainly among the best I’ve ever heard, and I don’t even have a personal connection to it. For her, waking up to that voicemail from Mom, it’s hard to even imagine.

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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.