Rideshare drivers experience the whole range of humanity. From picking up groups after a night on the town to taking someone to get their groceries, long-term drivers will see it all. Naturally, they pick up a few juicy stories along the way. In this AskReddit thread, rideshare drivers share their most shocking experiences.
13. New and old friends
It was a pool ride, first pax was a dude, he seemed drunk but not that much. I drive around 3 blocks to pick up the next passengers, a couple of friends, they did not seem to have ever met this first dude before. The guy sits at the front and the girl in the back, they are all going to the same side of town, and we proceed with the ride. As I make small talk with the dude in the front seat, the two in the back are having a conversation, but about 15 minutes later I don’t hear anything. I look in the mirror, and sure enough, they are making out furiously, pressing on the door. I have to pick up another pax, and she has to cough to get their attention so they would slide and make room. Anyway, the couple’s destination is the first, so they say goodbye and that’s it. Then I arrive at the first dude’s destination, but now he is asleep and really drunk, despite not having anything else to drink while riding. He wakes up all of the sudden, points at the other girl, says her name, and leaves. The girl told me they went to highschool together like 10 years ago. Keep in mind, I live in a city with 16+ million people, so the chances of uberpooling with a acquaintance are pretty low.
12. An unexpected destination
One of my first Uber rides ever was a girl around my age, and I asked her a lot of questions about what her job was like.
She told me that just the other day, after only doing it for a few weeks, she met up with a guy somewhere in LA and his trip was getting paid for by someone else, who sent him off with her. She ended up driving him for over 2 hours to the middle of nowhere and any time she tried to talk to him to figure him out, he was basically ignoring her. She was too naive and new to the process that she wasn’t sure what to do and she didn’t want to leave a random guy in the middle of nowhere who obviously couldn’t afford his own Uber ride.
So she takes him to his destination: prison.
Edit: The wording on the last sentence can be misinterpreted to mean she wanted to have him arrested. To clarify, he was reporting for his prison sentencing.
11. This tip was deserved
One of my favorite stories as a taxi driver was like this. I pick a guy up from the bar, and from the get go, he’s too drunk to tell me his address. After 10 minutes or so, I call the cops out to see if they can get him alert enough to go home, which they do.
Of course, as soon as we leave, he passes the f*ck out. One 25 minute drive later, we pull up to the house. I tell him we’re here. No answer. I tell him louder. Still no answer. I yell at his drunk ass, and he doesn’t even flinch.
At this point, I sigh and try knocking at the door. After a few minutes, this lady cracks the door ever so slightly and gives me the evil eye. I ask her if she has a husband, yeah tall, bald, and drunk, and tell her he’s in my cab passed out. She sighs, sets a shotgun down next to the door (3 am, I understand), and comes out to the guy.
Of course, he’s still passed out. She yells, nothing. Pinches, nothing. Gets to the point where she’s full arm slapping the guy in the face to wake him up, which he finally does, at least enough to get him stood up and out of the car. She turns to me, grabs his wallet, and asks how much he owes me.
Dude takes the opportunity to faceplant onto the concrete driveway, like he’s trying to headb*tt it into submission.
We get him inside and on the couch, where she proceeds to give me all the money in his wallet, as well as going upstairs and emptying hers as well (about a 200% tip).
10. A horrible situation
Not an uber driver, but one of my uber drivers told me his most NSFW story. It’s pretty f*cking wild:
So, he’s picking up this married couple from a restaurant. Right away, as they get in the back seat, there’s this weird tension between them. The husband is on his phone, sitting on the far left, and so is the wife, sitting on the far right. Neither of them acknowledge the driver. So, he kinda just goes with the flow. He didn’t know they were actually married at the time, just cause of how they were acting with each other, so he figured they probably didn’t know each other, and drove off.
He keeps hearing little message tones throughout the drive, and it was kinda obvious that it was them texting each other. So, he’s thinking “ok…they know eachother. WTF is going on?”
Then, the wife sends a message to the husband, and she puts down her phone, looking at the window. When the husband’s phone pings, the whole f*cking atmosphere FLIPS.
He looks over at her, and within a second, he grabs her face and smashes it REPEATEDLY against the window, with so much f*cking force that he breaks the f*cking window. At this point, the uber driver pulls the f*ck over and gets out of the car.
But the guys is SO f*cking enraged, that once the uber driver pulled over, he pushes the wife out of the car and starts BEATING her. And the poor wife’s face is f*cking broken.
SO the uber driver, who was a pretty tough guy, grabs him from the back. But the husband doesn’t quit. He keeps swinging, and eventually the uber driver grabs some rope from his trunk and ties his hands against his back, so he can call 911 and attend to the wife.
The poor woman, her eye was f*cking crushed and her jaw was completely broken. He calls 911, and they take the guy away and the woman to a hospital.
Later, the uber driver stays with the wife, and she tells him how he was always an abusive piece of sh^t, and that night she had texted him that she wanted a divorce, and to tell the uber driver to drop her off somewhere else. That’s when he snapped.
9. A ride and a show
When I went to California, my Uber driver was telling me his best stories. He told me how a couple late at night got in the back and a minute into the ride he felt a tap on his right shoulder and saw a hand with a fifty dollar bill and heard the words ‘keep your eyes on the road.’
They proceeded to fool around in the back seat while he watched in the rearview mirror.
8. Kids these days
Not me but my friend drives for Uber as a side job for extra cash.
Anyways, he once had these three girls who were all around 16-17 years old that wanted him to drive them to this party in San Francisco; about 45 minutes away from where he lives. He has nothing better to do so he does it.
So the entire ride there, they’re (the girls) taking shots and rolling blunts and every time they’d speak to him it was always some sort of perverted comment like “You’re hot” or “How big is your d%ck?” then they’d giggle about it. He brushes it all off as teenage girls just having fun, no big deal.
When they get to the destination they ask him if he wants to come inside and join the party, which he politely declines. He looks at the house and the neighborhood and it’s evidently clear that it’s one of the more expensive neighborhoods in the city; Pacific heights. The victorian houses you see in the movies.
He asked them who’s house this was and one of the girl’s replies “My boyfriend”. My friend says “You’re boyfriend’s parent’s must be rich” and she replies “Well, yeah, but this is HIS house”. He leaves it at that. Me and him discussed whether or not she was dating some middle aged creep or some lucky kid who has his own multi million dollar house.
TL;DR Friend drives teenage girls to potential creeps house.
7. We’ve all gotta make a living
I only drive during the day and early evening, so my shifts are always pretty tame. But once I picked up a passenger at a seedy exotic female club. Turned out she was a dancer.
Security walked her out, tucked her into my car, and called her by her stage name, which was Peaches.
Her name, at least on the account, was Linda. It was an hour drive, from one end of the city to the other. She didn’t say a word, and spent a fair bit of time counting and sorting cash, which looked to be all ones.
6. Just another Tuesday night
This is like 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night. I get a call at a bar near my house and a girl comes out with two dudes, all have been partying hard. She gets in the front and they get in the back. They’re going to another bar about 15 minutes away.
No big deal. She is also the most unattractive, white trash looking girl you can imagine.
She starts to pass out as we get on the interstate. Again, nothing significant. I drive a Kia, which like many Asian cars has a pull emergency brake in front of the center console.
Her arm has somehow gotten underneath the lever. I ask her to move it since we’re going 75 mph and I would prefer not to die. Her friends get super mad and start saying ‘YOU SHOULD GRAB HIS JUNK, THAT’LL SHOW HIM.’
So she reached over and grabbed my member.
They then decided I must be gay since the little guy didn’t appreciate this. I would have kicked them out, but we were on the interstate and their destination was right off the next exit anyway. She is the only person I’ve ever reported to uber.
My wife thought it was hilarious.
5. A unique approach to resolving conflict
Around 2am I picked up three people that seemed to be late-40’s-ish, two guys and a lady, all quite drunk. The destination is less than 10 minutes away, but the moment they climb in the car, the two in the back seat, the lady and one of the guys, get really hostile. She’s drunkenly threatening to punch him in the face while the guy in the front seat eggs her on and the guy in the back seat keeps half-yelling that he is chill. Super chill.
It wasn’t too difficult to figure out that the source of the conflict was that he was interested in getting with her and she wasn’t having any of it. Sort of.
As I’m beginning to consider pulling over and having them get out for fear that a real fight is about to break-out in my back seat, the guy in the front seat suddenly changes his tone and starts suggesting that they all should be friends. His plan for patching things up consisted of her showing them her bo*bs. It took her about 15 seconds to decide that it was a solid plan and happily presented her pleasure pillows for their peeping pleasure. (She was seated behind me. I didn’t bother sneaking a peak. I suspect I didn’t miss much.)
It culminated with the guys touching her bo*bs in a manner reminiscent of a pair of 8 year-olds petting a hedgehog. We arrived at their destination, another bar, a couple minutes later. They got 5 stars.
4. A tough decision
Around 6 p.m., I picked up a banker downtown and he asks me to take him to any park because he wants to clear his head. On the way, he keeps telling stories of how his wife is messing with his head and I try my best to reassure him everything would be fine.
I took him to the nearest park with a small lake and he tells me to wait while he gets his head in order, asks me personal questions and gives me $50.
Shortly before we leave the park around 7 p.m., he offers to fool around with me for $300. Hard choice, but $300 is a lot of money. I have to pay rent and keep up with the car payments so…
3. She didn’t even have the app
When I first started driving, sometimes I would forget to ask for the customer to state my name to make sure they were getting in the right car. Wrong pick ups happen a lot actually among new drivers. Well one day after a Steelers game, I pick up a woman who’s totally smashed. She tells me the destination and then passes out. Less than a block later, a woman flags me down and states my name, indicating she’s my actual passenger. So I’m red faced at this point, I try to get the other woman to wake up and tell her she’s in the wrong car, but she’s too drunk to realize what’s going on. She keeps telling me that this car is fine and just take the other woman home first, she doesn’t realize this isn’t how the system works. My actual passenger is really nice and says just take this woman home on my customer’s bill. So I’m often charitable, I decide I’ll take her home after my real passenger since they both live in the same area. But I’m definitely not going to charge the second part of the trip to my actual customer, she was also too drunk, I was afraid she wouldn’t remember her act of charity the next day. I ask the clueless woman if she can call her actual Uber driver and cancel before he/she makes a wasted trip. She hands me her phone and asks me to do it. She has no Uber or Lyft app on her phone, she must think we work just like taxis. So I continue driving my real passenger home. She passes out on top of the clueless woman. I don’t see this at first because they are both in the back seat.
So I drive along, several minutes later I hear a blood curdling scream of “Hellllllllp!” from the back seat. The clueless woman screams that she’s being attacked. I stop my car on the edge of a fairly busy road to look back, cars start honking at me. I turn around and start trying to shake her out of her stupor, I’m shouting “You’re okay, you’re okay. It’s just another woman on top of you! You’re not being attacked! You’re both just sleeping!” She keeps screaming and the other woman just presses against her face to get her to quiet down. I get her to come to her senses. She starts asking why another woman is lying on top of her, and she’s too drunk and tired to understand anything complicated at this point, so I said “You kept saying you were cold. She was keeping you warm. You’re sharing a ride for a split fare.” She accepts this explanation, considering this situation happened in winter and they both were only wearing a Steelers jersey, no long sleeves. I drop off my actual passenger, she thanks me and offers me a tip. I decline, but she insists because I was nice enough ‘to put up with her’. I said, “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were nice enough to share your ride and then you had to listen to a lot of screaming.” She hands me a few dollars anyway so I take them. So I still have the clueless woman’s address in my GPS’s history, I take her home.
She wakes up and tells me to pull over because she’s going to throw up. She stands outside the car for five minutes but doesn’t actually throw up. Keeping in mind, five minutes seems like an eternity, especially since this was a free ride and I wanted to get back on the road and make some money. She gets back in the car and tells me it’s a false alarm. We finally arrive at her house. I have to help her out of the car and up to her porch. She passes out on a swinging bench. I knock on the door to see if someone will answer. A guy answers and looks me up and down, and asks who I am. I tell him that I’m an Uber driver and ask if he knows this woman. He says she didn’t take him to the Steeler game so she can freeze for all he cares. Luckily he doesn’t close the door. After another ten minutes, I help this woman into the door to her house and close the door behind her.
Drunks. Got to love them.
2. They weren’t asking about music
I was driving back and forth between one neighborhood and a skrillex/bassnectar/some sh^tty wub-wub concert. I pick up a load of frat boys. “Woah bruh are you psyched for WUBWUBBAND?” on the way there one of the passengers ask me “hey bruh, do you mind if we bump?” To me “to bump” means to listen to music loudly. We are listening to the classical music station. So i turn up the volume and say “yeah, you guys like motzart?” And the bro responds “uhhh yeah, whatever” the next thing I know, i glance in my rear view and they are snorting cocaine.
1. I guess it worked out okay?
Picked up a bunch of high school girls and they dared two of their group to make out. They did the entire ride. The others were like, “okay, you win,” but the didn’t stop. They were the last two I dropped off.