I've done rideshare for a while now. It's an easy way to make exrra money and get a leg up on bills. Gas hasn't been too bad for me. But I live in Ohio, and my car gets decent mileage.
But lately, the job hasn't been as much fun as it once was. Some of that comes from not driving so late. I don't do the 12-3 drunk rush on Saturday nights. The people who get into my car are generally sober. They're also rather subdued.
But that's not a stressor. I drive less now partly because the service now pays bonuses for twenty runs a weekend. That's good. I get tired more easily these days. And that's one reason I want to wind down my rideshare career.
- Fatigue - I always got tired driving. But I used to drive set times, some of them until the wee hours on Saturdays. Now I notice it more knocking off at 10 or 11 PM.
- Wear and tear - This is a nice car I drive. I'd like to not buy another one for a few more years. Yet that dreaded 100K number is coming up.
- Driver shortage - You'd think this would be a plus. Fewer drivers mean more money. But the runs are longer. At one point, I got sent almost into Dayton. I live fifty miles south of there. Not a good night.
- Karening - I had a passenger who complained when I slowed down to look for an address. She reported me for falling asleep at the wheel. I reported her for being disruptive. I got $100 for having my account suspended for an evening.
- Violence - It's in the news. Violence is escalating. Random shootings have happened in Over the Rhine, the bar district where I've made a lot of money. It's not been a problem. Yet. The shootings tend to happen after I log off for the night. Still, one evening, I stopped at a Shell Station in Cincinnati's Price Hill neighborhood. Literally, it looked like a scene from The Wire. There was no question what was going on. I had four toddlers in the backseat while their grandmother ran inside to pick up something. I never locked the door during a shift before. I did this time.
Some would say, "Hey, this is a great opportunity for crime fiction." True. But if you've read just my stories, you know being in the story is not much fun.
Yeah, I can understand that not as much fun part. In Indianapolis and Flagstaff, I chatted up Lyft drivers for their stories. Fortunately, their stories were more Bad Karens than Bad Karma.
ReplyDeleteWhich is kind of funny. The only girl I know named Karen is the quintessential Karen. I swear the term was named after her.
The longest ride I'm personally aware of could also have become a criminal story. Some unknown to us man paid Lyft/Uber to drive the teen daughter of dear, dear friends ~265 miles (~425km) nearly 4 hours from Orlando to Tallahassee. Her mother, grandmother, and other family had no idea where she'd disappeared until she phoned family to fetch her back to Orlando. The driver was perfectly innocent, but what a frightening scenario.
I understand the not as much fun part, too. Back in the day, I worked at a corner convenience store in a bad part of Atlanta, where there was a lot of violence - robberies, shootings, etc. I didn't get robbed, but another coworker did.
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