No Night Shifts

This is why I work the hours that I do:

A young woman trying to reach her destination flew into a rage and beat up an Uber driver all because he refused to take her to her destination in Peru.
In a three-and-a-half minute video, Solange Estrada Liza, who claims she had previously had some alcoholic beverages before getting into the altercation, was attempting to get the driver to take her to her final destination.
But an argument ensued when the ride-sharing application’s driver refused to make the trip because he considered the area to be unsafe.

And this is why I don’t work the late-night shift.  I often joke that my reason is that I’m too old to be cleaning vomit out of my car at two o’clock in the morning, but the plain fact of the matter is that I have a very short fuse when it comes to dealing with drunk people — and had this drunken tottie tried that shit with me, she’d still be in hospital having her dinner through a straw.

People often ask me about strange experiences I’ve had as an Uber driver, and are amazed when I say that I haven’t had any.  (Sheesh, I’ve had stranger experiences driving my own kids around.)  About 80% of my passengers (and 90% of my earnings) come from sleepy businessmen and -women heading to the airport long before dawn to catch the first flight out, and the strangest request I’ve ever had was to stop for coffee en route to DFW, at 4am.  (I’m pretty sure that if I’d said no to the poor man, I’d have broken some state law.  Besides, he bought me a croissant.)

I especially like the fact that I have a small “stable” of regular riders who like me to drive them to and from the airport each week, which I do with the greatest of pleasure.  (The mechanics are simple:  I get to their house at the time they want to leave, and when they’re in the car, they call for a driver — which I’ll always get because I’m the closest driver to their location.)

The saddest drive I’ve had was to take a young man to a hotel because his girlfriend had tossed him out of the apartment at 3.30am.  (I knew he was in trouble — he was sitting on the sidewalk with four suitcases, a backpack and his dog.  Technically, I’m only supposed to take actual service dogs, but under the circumstances, I’d have been a bigger asshole than his ex-girlfriend to have refused him a ride.  And the dog licked my neck all the way to the hotel as though he knew what was happening.  I refused to take a tip, by the way.)

And just a final note:  I’m not a cab driver who is pretty much required to take passengers wherever they want to go.  I’m an independent operator driving his own car, and I don’t have to take anyone anywhere I don’t want to go.  (I think the skeeviest place I’ve ever taken a passenger was the VA hospital south of Dallas — and I took him because three Uber- and Lyft drivers had already turned him down, and anyway when it comes to Vietnam vets, I’m the softest touch in the world.  The Dallas VA isn’t a scary place, but the town it’s in most certainly is, especially at 5am.)

So my “job”, such as it is, is pretty uneventful, and I like it that way because I’m too old for the kind of excitement described in the article above.  And I’m way too old to get into fistfights with drunken idiots.