May 2, 2026: I didn’t sleep well. I woke up at 3:00 am on Friday night/Saturday morning, I saw some good surge prices downtown and decided to try it out. There’s allegedly good money in people out very late/very early, I wanted to see what happened.
The surges were gone when I got there. That’s a whole other thing to complain about, the disappearing surges… My first passenger was a waitress from a club that is open until 6:00 am. There were several dozen people hanging out at the bar. And yelling on the sidewalk. And running in the middle of the street. Peak drunk. There were two large security SUVs with several large men keeping order to some degree . Another world.
At the airport I picked up Walter. Walter knocked on my window and asked if I could do him a big favor. What’s the favor? My friend left his phone in the rental car, could you drive it to the hotel – please it would really save us. Wait, you don’t want to ride yourself, you just want me to ferry your phone back to the hotel? Okay! From my point of view, this is great. I’ll collect the same pay as usual. Plus Walter is desperate to get this dealt with, he will probably tip well. And I can play my music loud in the empty car. You got it pal. But, I asked, how can you trust me? He said I seemed like a trustworthy guy. He didn’t have much to go on, but he was right. I am.
At 5:30 am I picked up a pair of passengers from a club. 5:30 am!? Holy cow. Even when I was young I wasn’t out that late. It was a 45-minute drive to her house in the middle of nowhere (I should never have taken the fare in the first place). The piano jazz I was playing on the way knocked them both out in two minutes. They didn’t wake up until I blasted the radio at the end. Amazingly I got a fare only 1 minute away. That just doesn’t happen out in the deep suburbs. She wasn’t ready on time because it usually takes Uber 15 minutes to get a car to her. By now I desperately needed to pee – fortunately she was cool with it, even when the gas station that said it was open wasn’t open and the Publix that was lit up wasn’t open either. Thank goodness for McDonalds. From there I had three fares in a row to end the morning at 7:30 am only one mile from my house. Perfect.
I got home with the car at 20%, the phone at 15%. In a bit over four hours, I made ~$150, near $40/hour. Not bad! But meanwhile my teenage daughter made $110 in five hours babysitting three boys who were asleep most of her time. I’m barely doing better than her!
May 4 2026: Rick was a hardcore 76ers fan on his way to the airport. This was the morning after they knocked out me Celtics in Round One, Game 7. He gave me shit the entire ride. It was good shit, he knew how to twist the knife. A fun ride!
Dequez. This ride started as the usual questions about driving a Tesla. But we discovered we had much more in common. Dequez was the general manager of an LA Fitness. He leans very business intelligence/analytics. In his spare time he is taking a program in AI and Machine Learning while he codes up sales optimization dashboards for himself at work. By the end of the trip we were connected on LinkedIn and planning a lunch get together. (The lunch didn’t happen.)
An old one I forgot about: I had a woman who was going to her sons house. She had no money. She had to borrow money from someone to pay for the Uber. Her son has very serious medical issues and he hadn’t answered his phone all morning. She thought her son had died. She was hyperventilating during the ride and mumbling to herself. Of course the son was not dead. Her brother had taken him to the park in the morning (without his phone), then he had taken a nap. It’s never easy to be around someone facing death.
Mothers Day: Allesandra got in the car reeking of marjijuana. I had already judged her before she said a word. Both for smoking so much and because the smell stays in the car. She pre-emptively apologized to me. She had been at Jeff’s party. “Everybody was smoking. I can’t believe how much Jeff smoked — he should be dead!” She was extremely considerate. She wanted to give herself a spritz of perfume. But she knew that some other passengers might react to the perfume smell. My stepmom (who cannot handle perfume) would have approved. I ended up liking her a lot. Books and covers.