Can I use your bluetooth?

-
Trip distance:8.80km  Earnings:405 LKR

Customer location indicated that they were at a diner. The time was around 2.30 PM and this was a weekday. I automatically thought that this should be some kids after their school.

As I suspected, three teenagers got in to the car. I checked their destination, it was about 30 mins. I reconfirmed the location as I usually do with the passengers and started driving off. I could hear their idle chit chat at the back. And then a few loud whispers. The catch of being in a small hybrid hatchback is that almost all whispers are loud.

"Do you think we should ask him?"
"Don't. He'll think we are crazy."
"It is crazy."
"But it's just songs!"

I tried to see what is going on with my rear view mirror. The girl sitting in the middle suddenly straightened up.

"Hey can we use your bluetooth?"
"The bluetooth?"
"Yeah, you know, to stream our music?"

I could see one of the girls facepalming and looking away embarrassed. I couldn't see what the other one was doing, but I was willing to bet that day's earnings that she did the same.

I couldn't help but smile. "Sure madam. Let me park for a moment."

After about two minutes of trying, we managed to connect her phone to my car's speaker system. The rest of the ride which was supposed to be 20mins or less, took around 30mins. Dua Lipa was featuring quite high on the list.

I don't know what was most entertaining in that entire trip, some teenagers feeling bold enough to ask their Uber driver if they can hook their phone up with the car, me learning the latest hip hop songs from them or, the backseat girls yelling "Turn left! turn left!" instead of the usual Google akka.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Praise

-
Image
Trip distance: 8.90 km Earnings: 622 LKR It was another Saturday evening. The last customer I dropped off was a perfect example for a "useless" deal. The customer was waiting outside a popular cinema hall in Colombo and I received the hire nearly 1km away from him. As I got close to the location, I called the customer to check the exact location. This area is a network of one-way roads. If I mixed up the location with a mistake as simple as going to the other side of the road, I would have to drive around. The customer confirmed the location he was in and I continued to ask if they wanted to crossover to the other side of the road because they were travelling to that side. The answer was a curt "No". It was fascinating to see that they actually wanted to travel only 1.5km. Had they decided to cross the road over, it would have taken me a 500m less to pick them up. 1.5km to pick them up for a 1.5km travel. Great. My last hire for the day came from a famous hospital a...
Read more

A preamble

-
"And what would you do after you retire?" This was the question asked from me most often when I told people I wanted to retire early. "I don't know, I could run an Uber." was my response. While I was never serious when I gave that answer, I think I always had it at the back of my mind that this was something that I could at least try out, and could in an odd way, be fun. While I had many taxis during the period of 2011 - 2015, the time taxi services became affordable and accessible to many Sri Lankans and had at length spoken to the drivers, I had no personal experience being a taxi driver. Besides, after I bought my car, I had used taxi services very sparingly. It is then that I read on Sanjiva Weerawarna's blog that he was trying out being an Uber driver . Him being the founder CEO of one of the biggest tech companies in Sri Lanka, it was quite fascinating to read about it and I think I wouldn't have been the only one who would have wanted to re...
Read more

First Day

-
The day before my first day as an Uber driver, I received an email and an in-app notification that my Uber account is active. My original plan was to start the new job on Friday or Saturday, but ever since I got the notification, the need to test it out was the only thing in my mind. "Well, I will check it out this just for today" I thought. There weren't any meetings set for that day for me on my regular job. "If I started an hour earlier than usual, I probably would be able to make to work on time as well". Besides, I knew that Uber does allow the drivers to set up two destinations each day. These were supposed to allow the driver to pick up riders who are going towards the same direction as their destination, at least that was the theory.  At the time, I wasn't familiar with the saying "Best laid plans of mice and men, oft go awry", but that's exactly how it went. I was an hour late than an hour early and decided to pick up whoever th...
Read more