Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: The Man Who Is Awesome at Everything
Episode 24 in a series of true rideshare stories
They are in the middle of a conversation as they get in, and they don’t stop to acknowledge me. From what I can gather, a sporting event has been canceled due to weather and they disagree with one another about whether it was the right call.
“Isn’t that a safety issue though?” she asks. “Lightning?”
“I don’t think so. I think it was just the thunder they were worried about.”
“But it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll Google it.”
There is a moment of silence as she checks her phone. I expect her to come out with a detailed explanation of why the event in question was called off. Instead, she says, “Oh, okay. So I guess lightning is the actual electricity, and thunder is the sound that it makes when it hits.”
“Ah, that makes sense,” he says.
I choke back a laugh. These people are formally dressed and on their way from a luxurious home to one of the most expensive restaurants in town. They appear to be well off. It’s amazing how far they’ve gotten in life without knowing the difference between thunder and lightning, which my four-year-old nephew would probably be excited to explain to them. Are upperclass children so busy studying foreign currencies and learning to analyze stock market fluctuations that they never get to sit on a porch and count “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi” to figure out how far away the storm is?
She puts the phone away and changes the subject. “What were you watching when I came to get you?”
“No Country for Old Men.”
“Again?”
“It’s a great movie,” he says, and if he stopped there, he’d gain back some of my respect after the lightning thing, but he follows it up with, “That guy who directed it is a genius. He did No Country for Old Men, Sicario, and Hell or High Water.”
My inner movie geek is having a conniption. It takes everything I have not to pull the car over and explain that “that guy who directed” No Country for Old Men is actually two guys—Joel and Ethan Coen—and neither of them had anything to do with Sicario or Hell or High Water, which were also not directed by the same person. Maybe the source of his confusion is that Sicario and Hell or High Water were written by the same person—Taylor Sheridan—but Sheridan had no involvement in No Country for Old Men. This guy has no business telling people about movies. He knows less about movies than he does about meteorology.
A few minutes later they start making a plan for the social gathering they’re about to attend. As they struggle to remember the name of one of the women who is going to be there, he says to her, “Okay, we can’t both be bad with names. If this relationship is gonna work, one of us has to get good at it. And if it’s gonna be me, then you’re gonna have to get good at something that I’m not good at. Which will be hard, because I’m awesome at everything.”
They get out and shut the doors, still never having said a word to me. I close out the ride, thinking to myself, “I could name a couple things you’re not that awesome at.”
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.