I think it was the Third of July (Surge: Low)

It finally happened, I drove a fellow Googler last night! Well, I guess it sort of happened before when I picked up an intern, but this one was different.

I picked up a couple along the Riverway in Boston, and we were heading to Somerville. We got off to a good start talking about the Red Sox - they had been to the game yesterday, as had I, and thankfully it was far better than the game on Saturday. As we headed along, the routing was a bit weird, and we were talking about different apps, Waze vs Google Maps in particular. I mentioned my hope that Google didn't do what they too often do and kill off Waze, and eventually my passenger mentioned something like "and I work at Google so I know about that". I then couldn't resist responding with "hey, me too!"

Then, of course, we started talking more about Google. But first there was a bit of a negotiation protocol, where the rider told me where in our Cambridge campus he worked, and I told him where I worked. I gave him a closer look in the rearview mirror and we decided that we hadn't run into each other (well, we probably have, but not knowingly, anyway). Despite the "negotiation" we still didn't talk about confidential stuff or anything, of course, but we did have some amusing discussions about internal culture stuff.

This wound up a 22 minute ride, 8.98 miles, $16.91 earned with a light surge.

As you can see from the title and date, yesterday was the 3rd of July. For those of you not from Boston, we have a huge Fourth of July concert and fireworks spectacular on the Esplanade every year (though almost every year they talk about whether or not they'll be able to find funding for the next year, and this year the chair of the organizing committee is stepping down too, so who knows). Tons of people from all around come to Boston for this event, and people were lining up early this morning of the Fourth to get in and claim their spots.

A slightly lesser-known fact, though, is that there's a dress rehearsal / preview concert on the 3rd every year. That's why we had to take a kind of crazy route for my Googler friend - they close Storrow Drive for both the preview and the real concert because it's used for the huge throngs of pedestrians. Makes getting around a bit crazy, but thankfully Waze was up to the task.

After dropping off the Googler in Somerville I got a couple of rides in the Cambridge area, and then was back to surge-hunting. A bit after 9pm the downtown area seemed to be surging, so I headed over there, despite the terror of traffic I expected due to the preview concert. It actually wasn't terrible, and when I flipped over to the rider app I didn't see a ton of Ubers flooding the streets, but I really didn't get much by way of ride requests. The only one I did get canceled on me when I was halfway through the loop I had to make to get back to them in the concert area. Fortunately, this was the first time I actually got paid the cancelation fee, so it wasn't a total loss.

I decided to move away from the insanity of the Esplanade since I wasn't getting riders, and chased more high surge into the Seaport District... but it also turned out to be a dud. I'm not sure if people are still upset about Uber's outage on Thursday, or it was just too nice of a night so folks were deciding to walk, especially when they saw the surge. It was a generally pretty quiet night in the end, but felt at least a bit better than the massive over-saturation on Saturday.

Total for the night: 3 trips (+1 cancelation), 14.26 miles of rides, $33.38 earnings (including the cancelation fee). I may go out for a bit this late morning/afternoon, not sure - it's another nice day, and traffic will be crazy, so I'm not sure how busy things will be, but I'll probably at least check out the scene.