Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Broken Foot
Episode 39 in a series of true rideshare stories
He comes out of the hospital on crutches and asks if I can move the front seat as far forward as it will go so he can sit behind it. He puts the crutches next to him.
Normally I ask people how their day is going, but I’m never sure what to say to someone whose day clearly sucks. Still, he seems to be in a decent mood in spite of it—a good-looking guy in his late twenties with an accent I can’t quite place.
“Boise seems like a nice city,” he says.
“Oh yeah? You here visiting?”
“I guess you could say that. I just got Life Flighted in.”
That’s a new one. “Did you get injured in the mountains?”
“Yeah, my friend and I came out for a two-week hiking trip. Day one of the trip, I got my foot stuck under a tree root and fell to my side. My foot stayed in place and my whole body twisted. I could feel the bone snap before I even hit the ground.”
“Oh man, first day of the trip?”
“Yeah, about four hours in. I told my buddy he could keep going without me, but he didn’t want to. He’s catching a flight home today and I’m getting one tomorrow morning.”
“Man, that’s a miserable trip.”
“Eh, you win some, you lose some.”
There are two stops on this ride. The first is a pharmacy to pick up a prescription for pain pills, the second is a hotel. When we get to the pharmacy he asks if I can take him through the drive thru. I do, and they tell him it will take about ten minutes to fill the prescription. He asks me if that’s okay and I tell him it’s fine. We pull into a parking space.
We sit there for ten minutes and swap travel stories. His travel is based around hiking and work (he has some kind of job in communications that I don’t manage a good understanding of) whereas mine is more tourism, but we’ve both been to quite a few places.
After ten minutes, we try the drive thru again. There has been some kind of problem. Now it’s going to be another twenty minutes. They take his phone number and say they’ll call him. His superhumanly positive demeanor is finally showing signs of bending under the pressure. He asks me again if it’s okay for us to wait, and while waiting around this long on a ride is not good for my pay, I don’t like the idea of bailing on an injured guy who is trying to get medicated at the end of a trip from hell, so I tell him it’s fine.
This time, as we wait, he starts telling me about working as a contractor for the US military in the Middle East. He says shortly after arriving for the job, he and a few of his coworkers were taken into a van at gunpoint, where they were interrogated and slapped around a bit. “Not enough to do any real damage,” he says, “but enough that it felt real.” At the end of it, he came to find out that it was a staged kidnapping, and that they were being tested to see how they handled themselves under pressure. It sounds terrifying to me, but he’s sort of laughing it off as he tells the story, the same way he can laugh off breaking his foot at the beginning of a planned hike. It’s a kind of toughness of character that not a lot of people have.
After about half an hour, his phone has died, and we hit the drive thru a third time to ask if they can call my phone instead, but we find out the medication is finally ready. It’s only twenty bucks, but when he goes to pay, he realizes his wallet has gotten lost somewhere along his nightmare of a journey. He says he’ll use Apple Pay, then remembers his phone is dead. He asks the pharmacists if they have a charger that will fit his phone.
I tell him, forget it. I’ll pay the twenty bucks. When he gets his phone charged at the hotel, he can Venmo me. He comes off as an honest guy, and frankly, if this whole thing was a con to get twenty bucks out of me, this motherfucker has earned it.
We get the medication and I take him back to the hotel. I help him get his bags inside and get to the front desk, where I wait around a minute to make sure they’ll let him check in. They do, and we part ways. Sure enough, he sends me seventy dollars on Venmo, making it more than worth the hour and a half I spent with him.
My next ride is a husband and wife arriving at the airport. The wife gets in the back and says, “Can we put the seat back and let him ride in the front? He broke his foot on vacation.”
I laugh to myself and put the seat back.
“You’re not gonna believe this,” I tell them, “but I had the seat all the way forward because the last guy who was in the back also broke his foot on vacation.”
This new guy, with the new broken foot, is unamused. Like most people at the end of a trip from hell, he is unable to see past his own misery.
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.
Always a fun read! thanks