My Uber Nightmare
Posted on December 8th, 2014 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
I want to like Uber; there’s a lot to like about it, especially when you’re traveling in Miami, whose taxis often feel like they’ve drifted north from Cuba. (Not the drivers; the taxis.)
But in addition to the dubious ethics of its founders, and the serious privacy concerns I have about a company that can track your moves from point A to point B, I had an experience with Uber on Friday night that raises some serious issues about its lack of regulation.
I flew into Fort Lauderdale on Friday on my way to Miami for a Worth event. Landing at about 7 PM, I called an Uber car and got one promptly; the driver, Larry, was a nice guy, a Frank Sinatra fan, and the car was a new Cadillac. All good so far.
But after we’d been driving for about 15 minutes on I-95, his cell phone rang. He answered it. I heard him say, “That’s tonight? I thought that was tomorrow night? Really? Okay, I’ll be right there.”
I’ll be right there?
He hung up the phone and said to me, “I’m really sorry, but I have to do something and I’m going to have to drop you off.”
You can guess my reaction.
“That was my sister-in-law Lenora,” Larry explained. “I was supposed to take her to the hospital, and I completely forgot. You’re going to have to call another Uber.”
I said, “She can’t call another Uber?”
Okay, I know that wasn’t very nice, but I was a little freaked out.
Oh no, Larry answered, I could never do that. She’s my sister-in-law.
He promptly exited the highway onto an isolated access road and pulled into the parking lot of a Denny’s. “I’m really sorry,” he said as I called up the Uber app on my phone, and drove away.
So there I was, standing in the parking lot of a Dennys in the middle of not-very-nice nowhere, my luggage on the sidewalk next to me, waiting for another car, which took about ten minutes to arrive.
I gave the guy a one-star review and Uber didn’t charge me for that portion of a trip—the least they could do, I thought, and when I wrote them to point that out, they didn’t bother to respond.
Having a guy cut short your ride and drop you off to wait for another car is not good, and it’s hard to imagine that happening with a regulated company, or one with a stronger ethical culture.
Uber just held a financing round which valued the company at $40 billion. I’m not so sure. What if municipalities created a taxi app that worked just as Uber does? How hard could it be?
And at least they wouldn’t drop you off at a Dennys in the middle of nowhere…
5 Responses
12/8/2024 1:01 pm
Funny, I had a similar experience Friday night. I called an Uber, got the confirmation, and waited for it to arrive. After 5 minutes, the driver cancelled. I tried to re-order, and was informed of newly-imposed “peak pricing” at double the rate! Clearly, the driver saw the peak pricing go into effect, and cancelled the ride to take advantage of the higher rates. I took Lyft instead. The final insult was when I complained to Uber, they noted that I hadn’t been charged a cancellation fee, as if they’d done me some kind of a favor. The whole thing was particularly upsetting to me because my wife had been hit with a freak vertigo spell, and we were trying to get her home so she could lie down.
Fortunately, I think the discipline of the market will solve the problem better than any regulators, but in the meantime, people like you and me will have to avoid them until they get the message.
12/8/2024 1:24 pm
I wonder whether the people reading the comments are local or national (or in Hyderabad). I’ve had much more modest glitches in both DC and Boston, written them up, and gotten prompt email responses as well as fare adjustments, and I got the impression that the person responding in each case actually knew the local geography. Only time I tried complaining after a bad taxi experience. I gave up, because of course I did not have the exact time of my trip, medallion number, etc. The tracking that makes Uber so creepy is exactly what makes it POSSIBLE for these issues to be verified and countered quickly (in one case, they figured out exactly how much refund I should get because the driver missed the right freeway exit). It’s a pure privacy for quality play, and if the use of the data doesn’t feed back into firing bad drivers (your guy should clearly be taken off their list immediately), the business model will collapse. But with the growth pangs, the quality control may be different in different cities.
12/8/2024 5:00 pm
This just makes me sad.
Where I grew up and had my first jobs (in a land far away), this situation would not have been a nightmare.
It would have translated as follows:
Person A (the first driver) realizes that he can’t commit to his promise to offer a service for money because he has to take care of family in what seems to be somewhat of a crisis.
Person B (the passenger) understands and - while slightly inconvenienced - sucks it up. Could have been him forgetting his promise to help out a family member.
Person C (A’s employer) solves the issue by apologizing to B, telling A to keep better track of his promises, and of course keeping A on the payroll.
Stuff happens. We’re all in it together. But yeah, in this new world, we get to give our 1 star ratings (that guy probably never needed the money anyway, it’s not like his car wasn’t quite likely the only one in the extended family). Let the market take care of it.
And then ask yourself: Why was that place he dropped you in for a whole of 10 minutes so scary? In the country I live in now, there is seriously no place that I wouldn’t wait in for 10 min.
Of course the two are not connected. Don’t worry about the driver. He couldn’t find a *proper* job, he went to contract (or whatever you want to call it) for Uber, now his rating is crap for forgetting one thing. No way he’ll ever end up making places feel uncomfortable to wait in. He should just apply at Goldman Sachs or something.
surreal, the whole post: surreal.
12/8/2024 10:06 pm
Buffbot-You’re assuming that Larry’s story was true, which I wasn’t; for all I knew, Lenora could have been his mistress reminding him of an assignation. Larry wasn’t struggling; he had his own limo company, and he was working with Uber for extra cash; he’d just bought a new Cadillac. And the place he dropped me off wasn’t scary, particularly, but it was pretty desolate, and I can tell you that it’s not a comfortable feeling being dropped off at night in the parking lot of a fast food joint on an access road off I-95. I know plenty of women who would have felt extremely uncomfortable in that situation. In any case, whether it was his sister or mistress or someone else, I very much hope things worked out for him, but don’t expect me not to give him a bad rating. He failed at his job in a spectacular way.
12/9/2024 2:43 pm
Thanks, Richard, for taking the time to respond. Looks like the movie playing in my head after reading your post wasn’t the movie you saw / starred in.
So, not having been there and fleshing out / colouring in everything as I saw fit, well, maybe not the way to go about these things.
It’s a complicated world out there. Does my head in sometimes …