The Uberization of Life
I am just back from our five day whirlwind cabaret tour of New York City. We had Kim’s gig for the Make-a-Wish Foundation gala at Sony Hall on Thursday night (I was not-sleeping on the redeye at the time), the Mabel Mercer Foundation Cabaret Convention performance at Rose Hall at Lincoln Center on Friday night, the Those Girls show at the Laurie Beechman Theater on 42nd Street on Saturday night and the Singnasium (pronounced my Sydney Meyer as Sing-NA-sium) Trailblazers Gala on Sunday afternoon at Baruch College’s Engelman Hall. Is it any wonder I have come back with a bad head cold made all the worse by sitting on a Jet Blue flight from 8pm EDT to 11:18pm PDT yesterday?
The first thing I do when I get home is to look over the mail, which Kim has nicely sorted for me this morning. Besides all the offers from credit card companies that want me to borrow money from them via balance transfers (I’m not currently borrowing money, but as a banker I appreciate seeing the lending push as rates are rising), there is my weekend copy of the New Yorker, which somehow seems almost too appropriate for words. The cover of the October 31st issue is of Grand Central on Halloween, with various costumed crazies walking through the main train lobby floor around the big clock as they go about their normal New Yorker business on Monday of Halloween. But that was only yesterday and I was in Grand Central, going and coming from the Cornell Club on 44th and Fifth Avenue to the Chrysler Building complex on Third Avenue for a meeting with lawyers about an expert witness case I am on. I am all about efficient walking in New York (and anywhere, for that matter), so the easiest way to get from my starting point to the Chrysler Building was through Grand Central. It did occur to me that I would also benefit from the escalator up to the Met Life Building (aka The PanAm Building for those of us with New York memories) to handle the Manhattan elevation change from West to East. After 90 minutes of getting peppered with faux or practice litigator cross-examination questions (like, “when did you stop beating your wife”), I went back the way I came and passed through Grand Central again, aiming for those convenient escalators. That is exactly when I noted that I was walking through Grand Central (something I did thousands of times in my years in New York City) on Halloween and seeing a bunch of crazies in costumes while I was at it. It struck me as a prototypical New York scene, so imagine my surprise to returning to my New Yorker copy cover this morning. You can’t make this shit up.
During my trip to New York I almost wore out my Uber app, which doesn’t get a lot of exercise here on our hilltop when we are not traveling. To be exact, since Kim and I went to New York on different days, we had two Ubers to the San Diego Airport, two Ubers from JFK to the Cornell Club and then one shared Uber back to JFK and one shared Uber home from the airport last night. That was a total of six Uber airport runs. While I tend to use Uber XL when I am alone (it being the economy solo-not-shared version or Uber), when Kim and I are together, especially on airport runs, I get the Uber Black Car Premium rides to make sure we can fit all the luggage. I even chose the Uber Black SUV once when we had all our Spain Trip luggage for fear that I needed the big space of an SUV to handle it all. So, those airport rides average out to anywhere from $100 – $240 depending on tip and type of cars used. In other words, we are investing heavily in Uber during these trips.
In addition to the airports, while I generally prefer to use a yellow cab in NYC, the post-COVID environment seems to have changed enough (or at least where I was hanging out during this trip made it seem to have changed) so that yellow cabs never seemed to be available. I did try several times to no avail and thereby defaulted to the Uber app more and more often. It reminded me of a fateful trip to San Francisco that Kim and I took in about 2014 when Uber was still a pup and we noted that you almost HAD to use Uber there since there were never any cabs to be hailed. So, by my count of my and Kim’s Uber accounts, during those five days in NYC we took ten Ubers around town. Now, Kim is more likely to walk long distances than I am, and I positioned my activities to have only short distance walking to do (Bryant Park, Grand Central, etc.), so ten Uber’s was a lot and I’m guessing they averaged $35-$40 per ride. In other words, in the rank ordering of our trip expenses, there are now four major 4-digit categories: business/first class airfare, 4+-star hotel accommodations, nice restaurants where I invariable end up always picking up the tab, and Uber.
I did have a neighbor offer to drive me to the airport, but I just can’t justify asking someone to spend what amounts to 90 minutes round trip and probably 80 miles (so about 4 gallons of high-priced gas) to take me where Uber can take me all on the service of my phone app. Life is wonderful and its great that we can and have the ability to travel and so affording Uber in the budget seems to just have become part of life in these times. And then there is the story of last night’s Uber trip home from the airport….
We had checked bags, not because we didn’t each have carry-on bags, but because Kim needed one big bag for the wardrobe changes, so we booked all three bags for ease of airport maneuvering (in for a penny, in for a pound). I had pre-reserved my Uber for pick up when our flight arrived (I now am again totally conversant in Uber app language to be able to do things like reserve an appropriate car in advance). I followed protocol and texted the driver on landing that we had bags to pick up. AOK, he was waiting. Naturally, our Jet Blue Mint Service priority-checked bags with the special attention-getting tags on them, came out of the carousel dead last. So much for priority service. I texted Uber that I had the bags and where to meet. Which zone was I in? Zone Q. He was coming in his Black Chevy Suburban. At the curb the traffic was light given the late hour, and there he was, the Black Chevy Suburban with his lights flashing at me as he pulled over. My driver’s name was Saman, which seemed normal, so when the Arabic fellow jumped out to help us with our bags, I was not surprised and we quickly exchanged Uber/Marin names as he loaded the car and I clambered in. I did my usual and generally unnecessary “Take the 163 to the 15 North” bit, as though GPS didn’t exist and he gave me the normal yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it.
As we got closer to home, the driver started to veer right towards the Rt. 78 exit and both Kim and I warned him simultaneously that he needed to stay left to stay on the 15. While he complied, that is when he started to say that the GPS was telling him to take the 78. We then asked if he was our Uber driver, Saman. He said, no, he was Mohammed and he was NOT Uber, he was a local ride company. His English was not great so we were all a bit confused, but he hesitantly stayed on course to our exit on the 15. Meanwhile I checked the app and it showed my Uber car with Saman at the wheel driving away from us on the 78, heading for Carlsbad, where Mohammed said he was supposed to be going. That was pretty weird since Saman had never called me or texted me that anything was wrong.
When we got home, Mohammad was very nice and simply took my phone number and said that his boss would call me in the morning to straighten things out. He took a photo of my Uber app showing the price of my ride at $163 before tip. I got in the house and called the number on the app for Saman and when he called back he said that he realized there was a mix up, but his rider had confirmed that he was Richard when he entered (or so he said) and that they had somehow course corrected as we had at the 15/78 intersection. He also said that his rider had said he paid through Uber. This morning I got my Uber bill for $226 for Mr. Carlsbad’s ride (note that I have his address if I am so inclined to become an Uber stalker). The good news is that I have gotten no call from the local ride company. Presumably they were paid for the Carlsbad ride so I am the only guy out some $30-40 or the price of a NYC Uber ride. Screw it. The Uberization of Life is simply a cost of doing business in these times, I figure.