Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: This Fuckin' Guy...
Episode 44 in a series of true rideshare stories
They’re in their forties, both fit and well groomed—the kind of couple you expect to see in a coffee shop, making a spreadsheet with their workout schedule, meal plan, and each of their responsibilities to their home business.
“Uber is so fuckin’ stupid,” he says after a minute of driving. “Why would it tell you to turn there? We could take this street all the way to my house.”
“Maybe it’s faster,” she suggests with a shrug.
“It’s not faster. How would it be faster? It’s one fuckin’ street. Now we’re going to fifteen minutes out of the way on some other fuckin’ street?”
It’s a fifteen-minute trip, so we’re definitely not going fifteen minutes out of the way. It’s possible it’s a couple minutes slower since it’s an increased distance, but it’s also possible it’s faster since the speed limits are higher this way. It’s also rush hour and there are a lot of road closures that are causing major congestion all over the place, so in general, it’s hard to say.
“I can make a u-turn and we can take your way if you want,” I tell him.
“No, it’s whatever. We’re going this way now.”
So much for “fifteen minutes out of the way”. Apparently the one minute it would take to turn around isn’t worth it.
“God, all these fuckin’ road closures,” he says. “Nobody in this city knows what the fuck they’re doing.”
“Well, there’s always roadwork to be done,” she says. “It’s really never convenient.”
“Yeah, but they shut everything down at the same fuckin’ time, and then as soon as they’re done with one thing, they shut down something else,” he says, and I don’t bother telling him that he just said two opposite things.
The more they talk, the more it becomes apparent that they are cartoon characters. Every sentence out of the man’s mouth is negative, and every sentence out of the woman’s mouth is positive. She remarks about what a beautiful city it is, he remarks about how they keep fucking it up. She says the trees are beautiful. He says people are spending a fucking fortune cutting down the trees. Everything is “fucking” too. He reminds me Dennis Farina’s character in the movie Get Shorty remarking that “They say the fuckin’ smog is the fuckin’ reason you have such beautiful fuckin’ sunsets.” I’m not one to get offended by language, but Jesus, change up your fuckin’ descriptors once in a while, would you, please?
“I flew in this morning,” she says. “I like the airport here, how it’s small and easy to get around.”
“Did you see the collapsed fuckin’ hangar?”
“No.”
“These fuckin’ idiots. They were building this big fuckin’ hangar, but they were cutting costs and the fuckin’ thing collapsed. Bunch of people fuckin’ died.”
“That’s sad.”
“It’s not sad, it’s fuckin’ negligent.”
The other thing I’m noticing is he doesn’t seem capable of agreeing with anything anyone else says. I find him grating after two minutes. I don’t know where she gets her superhuman positivity but it’s like she doesn’t even notice. She just keeps smiling and saying positive things and he just keeps shooting down all those positive things. They say opposites attract, but this is fuckin’ ridiculous.
I eventually gather that she is a flight attendant, which seems fitting of the permanent smile on her face. She talks about spending the last few days in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and having lots of fun there (surprise: he thinks both places fuckin’ suck).
I get them to a beautiful house on a hill. She thanks me for the ride. He just gets out.
Passengers and drivers can give each other star ratings. Anything less than a three, from either party, and the app will never match us again. It’s handy for passengers who get a driver they find rude or dangerous or whose car is filthy, and it’s handy for drivers dealing with obnoxious passengers. I’m pretty lax. If somebody is drunk to the point of being a vomit-hazard, I’ll vote them down so I don’t have to take the risk again. Or if they leave a mess. Or if they are excessively rude and argumentative and I’d rather not have another interaction with them. But it’s rare.
With this guy, I hesitate. In spite of everything, he was actually never disrespectful toward me personally, he didn’t make a mess of the vehicle, and he wasn’t plastered. He’s not what I’d think of as a “bad customer” exactly. He’s just a drag to be around.
I think of that Black Mirror episode with the social credit ratings that rule everyone’s life. I don’t like that technology is increasingly immersing us in a snitch-based culture where we anonymously cut each other down over perceived infractions, hiding behind phone screens like cowards as we vote on who the digital gods should bless and who they should smite. But I still don’t like the guy.
If this were a movie, I would say something. Rather than giving him one star behind his back like a coward, I would groan, take a deep breath, and roll down the window just before he walked away. I would say, “Excuse me? Sir? I just have to tell you something, because I don’t know if you have someone in your life who will say it: it seems like you’re really successful, and your disagreeableness might help you a lot in the business world, and you have a beautiful house, and if this is your wife or your girlfriend, she seems just so great, and honestly, good for you, but the thing is… you are just fucking awful. I spent fifteen minutes with you just now and you complained about thirty things. I feel like if I had one of those clickers that they use in sporting events and I was trying to keep track of your complaints, I would’ve been so busy with it I would have crashed us into a goddamn bus. And I don’t know if you have, like, friends and loved ones, but if there are people who spend time with you, it can only be because you’re successful and they’re hoping that some of your status will rub off on them, because status is all you have. As a person to hang out with, you’re like an anal rash. You’re just so unbelievably irritating. If a child complained as much as you do, you’d never take that child anywhere. You’d just leave him at home and go do shit without him. And maybe that’s what your parents did with you and it’s why you became independent and successful and also why you never had to stop whining about everything, but I bet you could get so much more out of life if you could just be, like, even twenty percent less of a dick. Maybe you could set an alert on your phone every forty-five minutes that says, ‘What was the last thing I bitched about’ and every day you could keep a list, and just try to take one-out-of-five at the end of each day and go, ‘You know what, I’m gonna stop bitching about that going forward.’ Or ask her for a few things that made her happy today and see if you can agree with, you know, one fucking thing. Just one. For the love of God! That might be fun for a change, wouldn’t it? Being happy about something? Come on, what do you think?”
I think the reason people say things like that in movies, is out of wish fulfillment. We sit in the audience, and we laugh or cheer, and we think of a coworker, or a neighbor, or a family member who we’d love to say it to. But most of the time, we can’t actually bring ourselves to do it. In real life, it’s how you get a tooth knocked out, how you get a call made to your employer, or at the very least, how you get a one-star rating.
In this guy’s case, I give him three stars. He’s not technically doing anything wrong, but given the choice, I’d sooner never see him again. And I guess I won’t.
Really though, I should’ve fuckin’ said it.
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.
What an awful guy!