For two weeks last spring, right before the pandemic hit, I was a Lyft driver. I wondered if it’d be a way through my usual afternoon slump, a change in activity and sociality after a morning staring at computer screens. I wondered about the economics of it, the resulting hourly wage and its feasibility as a side gig. But mostly, I think I was curious about the experience in general. What was it like, as a whole, to be a rideshare driver?
I filled out the application and picked up my rental at the local hub, across the way from the Masonic Temple. I bought a bulk-pack of bottled water and interior detailing wipes. I nearly flubbed my first pickup because I wasn’t used to the laxer standing norms for service vehicles, hadn’t yet learned the subtle visual cues of an expectant rider. I remembered stories my parents would tell of when we first moved to the States, of Dad’s tips from delivering pizza and Chinese food getting wiped out by parking fines. When later in the year Julia and I watched this episode of Ramy, I’d feel an unexpected kinship with the mother character who, out of loneliness, starts driving too.
As with any job or task, it’s easy to overlook – until you start doing it yourself – all its idiocyncracies. The strike against my airport record for not taking the right ramp to the designated pickup zone. The words “Buy American” sharpied on a wall in a port-a-john in the airport staging lot. The time I waited for fifteen minutes on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere only to realize that, likely due to some design oversight in the app or phone’s OS, the rider’s errant finger swipe dropped their location pin miles away from their actual location.
Though: these are more than idiosyncracies, more than even annoyances. You start to see, through them, the impossible situations that drivers face every day. You might drive twenty minutes to your next pickup only to find that you can’t accept it because it voilates ride guidelines, and you end up losing the fare – and risk upsetting the passenger, who could leave you a bad rating, which then you have to reach out to driver support, on your own unpaid time, to try to undo. I can easily imagine drivers who, not wanting to lose that fare, choose to accept the ride and risk violating the terms of service. I imagine that they make this choice in a split second as they pull up to their pickup destination. I imagine that this happens every single day.
