Why am I doing this?

The most common question I get from friends and family when I tell them about my decision to drive for Uber (and blog about it) is "why?".

For basically as long as I've ridden in Ubers, I've considered them a) better than taxis (especially here in Boston!) and b) not as good as they could be. Let's be honest, I'm type A, I'm a geek, and I think I'm a better driver than almost everyone else on the road (who doesn't? :)). Combine those things and sitting in a car while a driver stumbles around a city, barely avoiding death and failing repeatedly to follow their GPS' directions, and you've got your answer.

That said, there was one story that really broke the camel's back. It happened on a recent trip to Baltimore to watch the Red Sox at Camden Yards. Liz, naturally, jumped at the chance to turn it into a history tour, so one of our days we went out to Fort McHenry National Monument. The trip out there was fine, but the ride back, woo boy...

We made the request - it was several minutes out, unsurprisingly, because Fort McHenry is sort of out on the edge of a peninsula (that's why it was a good spot for a fort, after all), so that was no problem or surprise. Soon enough the driver arrived, we got in, confirmed our destination (we'd entered it from the app, like good Uberers), and he fired off his nav - Waze, which I took to be a good sign. Turns out, I was wrong.

Waze sent us on a somewhat unbeaten path, as it is wont to do. Fine, no problem. But it sent us in a direction that crossed a major rail yard. And there was a train blocking the path. The train was moving, but not especially quickly. Okay, we thought, no huge deal, we'll sit here a bit, it'll clear out, we'll go on. No problem. Welllllll, let me tell you about that train. I think it was looped in a circle, because it just kept going, and going. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. Oh shit, it's slowing down. Phew, it's speeding back up again. 15 minutes. Now it's stopped. WTF.

Meanwhile, cars in front of and behind us are turning around, but the driver is just sitting there. I tried pulling out Waze on my phone and marking the road ahead of us as blocked, so the driver's Waze would re-route, but I couldn't manage to get it to let me mark that one segment blocked, only the segments behind us - doh! When the train stopped, I finally tried to ask the driver to turn around. His English was not super great, but I think he was basically saying "but the GPS says go this way".

I ended up having to basically coach him into turning around, and then Waze tried to send us the same way again! I think I managed to explain that no, he should just go past that intersection and it would re-route. He didn't seem to believe me, but eventually we did in fact do that, and got back on a route towards our destination.

But wait! The fun doesn't end there! Somehow in all of that, it seems that the destination in Waze got messed up, and once we got into the city, all of a sudden in a random not-so-great neighborhood the driver tries to drop us off, asking which side of the street we wanted to get out on. The answer was quite clearly "neither", and the driver was so unable/unwilling to communicate that he just handed his phone back to me to put in the destination. Great, that's probably actually the best solution all day. I fixed the destination, and, whew, a few minutes later we actually got there.

Unfortunately, it turned out "there" was in fact closed. Doh. But that one wasn't the driver's fault, at least. I did make sure to update Google Maps' data with the opening hours so hopefully others wouldn't get messed up.

So, that adventure was why I decided to become an Uber driver. I actually started the process right there in his car, while we were sitting at the train tracks. Probably around minute 8, though I really am just making that up, I don't have that kind of memory. :) So I guess we all have that guy to thank - thanks crappy Baltimore driver!