WASHINGTON D.C. — I have been an Uber driver for a few months now. As a rule, I don’t drive more than three days a week, for three to four hours a day. If you want to hire me, my Uber app will show you that my rating is 4.82, which puts me in the 90th percentile of five-star Uber drivers.
But that figure doesn’t mean much; the hard-earned rating can be turned into dust with one rider’s negative evaluation. When a driver’s ratings reach the red line — meaning an intolerable 4.6 — Uber starts monitoring the driver, and they can easily be “deactivated,” the Uber term for being fired. How can one slip from high to low in an instant? It happened to me one lovely spring morning when exploring a new, off-track neighborhood.
I don’t remember her name, but she was an Asian lady, and her name was western. As soon as she sat in the car, I knew that it was not going to end well. “Why are you going straight? You should turn right,” she ordered as soon as we started our trip. I was only into the second week of my driving, and a ride from Washington D.C.”s NW area across the river into the forest-like Virginia countryside, tangled by highways, is different from merely crossing a neighborhood. And the lady passenger, sitting comfortably in the back seat of my car, was enjoying her controlling position.
As an Uber driver, you only have one option: You either know the city like the back of your hand, or you follow the instructions on the navigation app. There is no middle way. It doesn’t work to combine the two while driving. Our brain is too slow or the terrain blends poorly with the virtual reality of the app, though it must be different for an observer, as the lady presently behind my back, who knew the road very well and was comparing it with the app on her smartphone. And loving it. So when I took a link road that was supposed to get us on the bridge and then on the other side of Potomac River, into Virginia, I found myself in front of a barrier, with the sign that read, “Closed Road.”
