What I think New Uber Drivers Should know

You're not going to get rich.

    Uber doesn't give money away. If you're going to make it pay you're going to have to put in a lot of time and a lot of miles.

    This shouldn't really impact part timers just looking to pick up some extra spending money but something to keep in mind if you're going full time.

Clean

    People are incredibly messy. You can separate yourself from the ocean of other uber drivers by simply keeping your car clean.

    I vacuum out my car with a shop vac and then hit the floor mats, doors, and sides with some lavender scented simple green from a spray bottle and a microfiber towel.

    Every so often, once a month maybe, I hit the actual seats with a portable carpet cleaner (the kind that sprays cleaning solution and then you use a wand to suck everything up).

    I keep a bottle of windex and some extra micro fiber towels with me when I go out.

I've ridden in ubers.

My seats look nothing like their seats because I take cleaning them seriously.

I think you should keep your car clean for two reasons.

1. You're going to be spending a lot of time in the car. So spend your time in a clean place, not a filthy one.
2. This is just my feeling, but I think people are more more at ease in a comfortably clean ride, and are more likely to tip.

Gear I recommend:

1. shop vac ($40+)
2. microfiber towels ($30)
3. bissle pro portable spot cleaner ($150)
4. simple green and windex

Illusion of Clean

You can cheat on your cleaning game.

I use the febreeze air vent clips that smell like fresh laundry.

People will judge your car by what they see yes, but smell is also a huge factor that shouldn't be ignored.

People will forgive a little dirt on the floor mats if their nose is telling them the car is super clean.

I can't even begin to tell you how many people when they climb into the car tell me with impressed surprise in their voice how clean it is or how nice it smells (to which my stock reply is: "Thanks, lot's of cleaning, I can tell you.")

I think I get a 5pack for around $8 at my wholesale club and each one lasts a month. A small investment that's worth every penny.

Get All Weather Floor Mats

If it's raining people's shoes are wet.

If it's snowing people are going to track it in and its going to melt in your car.

I had a guy fall asleep and pour out nearly the entire bottle of rum he had with him, leaving me with a lake of booze on the floor of the backseat.

    In all of these cases, not to mention just regular old dirt and debris you need tough floor mats that will contain the mess people make and let you get it vacuumed up or wiped away easily.

    I invested in the premium weather-tech mats but there are lots of cheaper options out there.

Get a dashcam

Expensive, but in this day and age if shit really hits the fan the thing that can save you is dashcam video of the whole thing.

Watch Dashcam videos

I'm a bit of an oddball here, but I think it is useful to watch dashcam videos on youtube.

1. You can see the same patterns of mistakes being repeated over and over which allows you to recognize dicey situations and better prepare or, even better, avoid them.
2. Its a good to remind yourself that people are insane and have no idea what their doing.

4 ways your uber driver can tell you aren't going to tip

Members of the public often think that service industry people should be pulling out all the stops all the time in hopes of making that big fat tip.

Service industry people however, know that, in reality, not only are the vast majority of people not going to tip, they were never going to tip no matter how good the service was.

Here are 4 signs one salty driver has picked up that can tell him you're not going to tip.

Tell me you're going to tip

You're trying to coax your drunk friend into the car to get her home because she is blackout drunk and parading around like a cat with its back up but she isn't as convinced that being sensible is a good idea.

So in between shouting her name and ejaculating "Come On!" into the night you assure me with ever greater fervor that you are going to tip me more than you've ever tipped anyone in your entire life.

I look on resignedly as we both watch the clock tick my profit away. 

Finally, some ten minutes later after several failed attempts you have your friend in the car who then proceeds to use her outdoor voice to holler out exactly what song she wants to hear on the radio.

You're trying to keep me focused on the tip you're going to give me but it's hard to hear over the offkey strains of Rihanna errupting out of your friends throat. 

By the time we get to your destination your mouth is full of thanks, but now you've got your hands full getting Ms. drunk and disorderly someplace where she'll hopefully pass out peacefully. 

Any thought of tipping is gone from your mind before the car door closes.

Ironically the people who swear up and down and wax eloquent about the magnificent size of their tip are the people who never tip.

Be a Child

Children are highschool through college age. 

People who are old enough to go out in the world on their own but not yet adult enough to have broken from "the world revolves around me" thinking.

You just waited 20 minutes for an uber ride. Why? 

Because you're in the middle of no-where at 3am when all the other uber drivers have gone to bed.

So you waited for me to drive 20 minutes to come get you, then another 7 minutes because you've just realized you screwed up your location and you aren't where you told me you'd be.

When I finally find you and get you home you slump off without a backwards glance. 

After all, its way past your bed time. Any thoughts about the guy who just delivered you to your nice warm bed will have to wait until never; 

because you're a child and it is simply the duty of all adults to get you out of your binds.

Don't Speak

Me: Howdy there!

Rider: .....

Me: How 'you doing this evening?

Rider: .......

When you walk into your living room you don't greet the couch, because that wouldn't make sense.

When you summon an uber driver to take you where you want to go, same thing.

If your uber driver is basically a couch why would you tip him?

Do you tip your couch after a particularly comfy sit?

Be Running Late

You're being late means four things to me.

1. It means you won't be ready when I arrive (because you're running late) so I'm probably going to have some time to kill before you want me to be in an extreme hurry.
2. It means you'll get in in shambles and explain that you'll reward me handsomely for making time.
3. It means you're going to fill the car with that brittle stink of high anxiety the entire ride.
4. It means that when we arrive after I've set a land speed record to rescue your day you'll dash off, and with all the things you now have to catch up on who really has time to go into their phone again to tip? Besides, right now you gotta go sell the boss on how you were all set to arrive on time this time but the darned uber driver was late and then got lost on the way here and then just drove around the building in circles refusing to let you out while cackling maniacally.

End Rant

I don't want to make it out like everyone is a scumbag.

There are people I've met and talked to that I have profoundly enjoyed. People with wit and interesting ideas.

So I'll close with one final observation:

The people who don't tip by and large aren't successful. The people who do tip are.

Now, you can argue: Of course the people who tip are more successful, they have more to give away.

However I think you have it backwards, the people who tip are more successful because they just do nice things for other people even when they don't have to.

Be a person who tips.

A Toddler's Palate

 I babysat my nephew over valentines day so that my sister and her husband could go on a nice dinner date.

My nephew is two and I don't get to see him that much because he lives in California whereas I live in Baltimore.

Anyway, turns out my nephew's preferred meal of the moment is box mac and cheese.

Well, I thought to myself deviously, We're going to use this to show up my sister. No plain jane mac and cheese for my nephew! We'll sauté some carrot shavings, some caramelized onions, maybe even some fried mushrooms if we have any in the fridge. 

Flames leapt from stoves, pots rustled and clanged, fridges poured its contents onto cutting boards, where the chatter of knives sounded.

Amidst the steam and commotion tender carrot bits, lightly browned onions, and crispy mushrooms were thrown into the final pot with the listless macaroni, mixed with passion, and presented with a proud flourish to the nephew.

Who proceeded to pick through it. 

Not eating a single morsel.

His toddler fork clutched clumsily in his fist, 

sweeping in out of the dish inexpertly, 

he'd glance up at me from time to time, as if to say: 

But why have you despoiled the pristine beauty of my repast with your barbarous culinary delusions? What have I done, dear uncle, to warrant such base treatment?

So, naturally when his parents got home with a chinese food box full of steamed broccoli he proceeded to devour the entire thing.

If I didn't like him so much I'd be insulted.

Fasting: A timeline

I've just finished a three day fast of what I think is called a water fast, sort of.

Since it's my fast and I get to make the rules here are the things I was allowed:

• water
• coffee (black)
• tea (straight)

I allow coffee and tea because as far as I know neither has any actual calories in it, and are basically just bean or leaf essence dissolved in water. For my purposes this is close enough to water that I don't care.

Day Before

You eat mainly left overs trying to finish everything so that both there is less laying around to tempt you and to chew through anything that might go bad while you aren't eating.

There is a vague buzz of excitement about the task you're about to undertake. First world problems.

Day One

Oddly, this day is fairly normal.

Well, it is if you're like me and you skip breakfast and usually lunch anyway. The only real difference is that you (again if you are a strange individual like myself) don't get to put heavy cream in your coffee. You start to notice it again in the evening when you're expecting food but you can distract yourself pretty easily.

Day Two

The morning is pretty normal.

As the day progresses you notice your thoughts are getting a bit loopier, that you're having more thoughts about food and recipes and my god is it shocking how many ads are food related.

At some point you realize it's been a while since you pooped, followed quickly by the thought that yeah, that is probably correlated to not eating.

Is it really colder in here or is this some strange side effect of fasting? Or am I just imagining it? Either way let me put on some socks and gloves because my extremities are feeling a bit chilled.

You feel smaller, physically shrunken.

I don't have a scale so I don't have weight measurements, but I started wondering if I appear physically different.

Day Three

Conservation of motion.

Somewhere deep in your brain some part of you is evaluating every idea by how many calories it would take to execute and pushing all the low calorie ideas to the top of the docket and sliding the high calorie ideas to the bottom.

You'll notice the things you want to do all involve a lot of sitting. You have to do a bit of hyping yourself up before you actually get into a task that involves standing.

And by the way, don't stand up too quickly. Nothing serious but you could get a little light headed.

You're not exhausted, its just like you're in a continual state of the beginning stages of winded without the stitches on your side.

Focus starts to become more troublesome. You'll find your thoughts wandering without your notice, 50% of the time ending up on some food related issue, and holding to any one topic effortful.

All the things you've been drinking are really boring, made worse by the fact that you have to keep drinking increasing amounts to distract yourself from the hunger. You're reminded how much black coffee tastes like licking the terminals of a battery.

You start to notice how much more time you have without cooking and eating chewing up any of the clock.

Bargaining begins. When is the actual end of the fast? Does sundown count? Is it midnight? What if we cut it short by an hour? What if we start cooking now so that it will be done by the deadline? Promise we won't snack in the meantime. No one will notice.

In your head you start doing the mental math of counting down the hours until the finish line. Dreams of the meal you're going to make to celebrate the finish start swirling.

You think about sleeping. You tell yourself you'll just go to bed and when you wake up you'll have a decadent meal. But you're unable to convince yourself you're not legitimately hungry, so instead you decide to stay up until midnight, checking the clock every twenty minutes in the final hour.

You've already set up the cutting board, the knife, the condiments, all the bowls and utensils, everything is laid out for maximum efficiency.

Day After

The stroke of midnight passes and you charge into the kitchen. You want to eat everything all at once, anything you can think of sounds delicious.

The small snack you make before the main meal, a hotdog in my case, you notice your jaw feels tired already.

No matter.

You make the meal you've been dreaming of for the last several hours, and it feels great to be full. Throw on a couple of bites of snack in the aftermath just for good measure and go to bed.

I should mention that yeah I know you're not supposed to go to bed right after eating. I forget why this is but I know it isn't recommended. However the doctors who advise this clearly have no idea how good it feels to go to bed on a full stomach.

In my particular case lying in bed I noticed my heart in a funny rhythm, which was slightly disconcerting, but rolling over onto my back seemed to normalize things.

Waking up the part of your brain that was focused on calorie conservation is still on alert.

Pooping resumes, as if that first meal was fast tracked through the system.

Final Reflections

Fasting is an interesting experience.

Did this fast accomplish the goals I wanted it to?

No, I don't think it did.

I wanted to use the time to concentrate on reflecting on the past and what I wanted from the future and I did almost none of that. There is some benefit from the exercise of mind over mater but in all this fell short of the goals I set.

Personal History

 It's so much harder to pretend you're sane when you get into your thirties.

I was with a girl for 5 years, we lived together in a house she owned.

When we broke up I found myself homeless late on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday, calling a friend of mine to see if I could crash on his couch.

For reasons I cannot fully articulate I decided that every year I would dedicate three days on the anniversary to fasting and remembering. It seemed like the right thing to do.

I stand by that decision but it is damned difficult to explain to friends, let alone strangers.

"You're not drinking tonight?"

"No, I'm fasting."

"Why?"

"The personal holiday I keep that doesn't yet have a name where I fast in remembrance of the time five years of relationship crumbled into ashes and I was homeless."

Let me tell you, even people you've know since childhood will give you strange looks at that one.

It was so much easier in my twenties. Real life was still some distant concept. The objectives were pretty clear and simple. Go to class, make some gesture at doing the work they required, meet up with friends and have a good time.

That was it.

Heartbreaks were intense but short lived. The stakes were low and nothing reached deep enough to have a lasting effect. There just wasn't enough history.

 Ten years later there is just so much history everywhere.

7 Things I've learned about cleaning my car interior

 No preamble this time, we're just going to jump right in to it.

Microfiber towels

I used to use paper towels for everything but I hated all the little bits of lint they would leave floating around. Microfiber towels are a game changer. They're cheap, and reusable though you can certainly get higher quality with a higher price point. I use them for basically everything these days.

Bissell 3624 Spot Clean pro

For those of use with cloth seats this thing is amazing. It's portable, about the size of a good sized crock pot, with a long cord for connecting to distant outlets. One thing: don't go bananas on the handle. If you use two hands as I did to really press the handle into the fabric it will crack. It'll do just fine if you use one hand but not two.

Magic Eraser

I've always had a lot of trouble with streaking when I clean my windows, which drives me nuts. Partly this may be due to the towels I've used, but something I find that helps is Magic Erasers. 

Pro tip: magic eraser is just a brand name, if you want to pick up a bunch of 'magic erasers' cheap search for melamine. It's the same stuff without the pricey marketing.

Vacuum First

Vacuum the interior as the first step on your interior cleaning process, before you start cleaning the seats, or the floor mats, or windows. 

Pro tip: when you're vacuuming the sensitive areas like the radio, use a soft brush in combination with the vacuum to get all the little bits of dust and lint. The same is true for the air vents.

Clean Seats Second

If you're going to deep clean the seats with the afore mentioned Bissell do this second. Inevitably the sprayer will get solution on areas you didn't mean to, like the floor mats, which is fine if you're to clean those later anyway.

Pro tip: if you get serious use a pump sprayer for your cleaning solution. Fill the Bissell's cleaning solution tank with water. Spray the water as you suck up the cleaning solution. When everything is coming up clear through the Bissell you know you won't have any soapy residue left in the fabric.

Floor mats:

Now clean the floor mats. I have all weather mats so I just use simple green and a scrub brush.

Plastic Protector

It is amazing what plastic protector can do. I use 303 Aerospace protector and man it really livens up the plastic to looking like new again. Especially in areas that get a lot of sunlight and not too much attention like the dash. Looks great.

Pro tip: if you have all weather floor mats like I do you can use the plastic protector on them to get them looking fresh but be warned it also makes them incredibly slippery. So if you have people getting into your car you might want to warn them.

To the Bone

There is an element of masochism in endurance sports.

The essential question being: how far can I push myself? How deeply from the cup of suffering can I drink before I turn away?

I've done centuries, marathons and ultra-marathons and there is a gratification from prevailing through the pain and conquering the distance.

Which is why I think I found To the Bone strangely alluring.

To the Bone is a Netflix film that follows an anorexic girl as she goes into therapy. We meet some other characters with eating disorders along the way and at the end everything is wrapped up by fading in upbeat music.

To say that I am deeply skeptical that a serious eating disorder can be overcome so quickly is understating the matter.

However, I came away from the film thinking that the anorexic and I aren't really so different.

That drive, internally competitive, to see just how far you can starve yourself before the whole system breaks seems to me not that far from how many miles can I log. Indeed, at the upper echelons of the sport, the anorexic and the ultra runner don't even look that far apart.

What then is the difference or is there even a difference?

I would argue that endurance sports, while grueling, are at their core life affirming activities. The people drawn to running and cycling are happy when they do it. Whereas people who are drawn to eating disorders are miserable.

That the person with an eating disorder may derive satisfaction from their self-denial of food there isn't the joy you can find in people who run.

Shampoo

 There was a time I had luscious, flowing, locks of auburn hair.

Picture Fabio but not a blonde.

And not in as good a shape.

And not as good looking.

Aside from these caveats I was basically exactly like Fabio, ready to grace the cover of a romance novel on horseback, with my gossamer shirt thrown open by the wind, luxurious hair, trailing behind me.

Because of all this hair I was in the market for shampoo.

I read somewhere that people choose their shampoo not be how well it cleans hair, which you would think would be the real trait people are after, but by its smells.

I was dumbfounded by this information.

In choosing shampoo for myself went into the shower to see which kind my sister used. I had borrowed a bit one time when I was out of shampoo myself, and lathering up I remember thinking: this smells like grapefruit. It must be doing to dirt what it does to my tastebuds!

Now, I loathe grapefruit. Why they are sold at grocery stores is something I've never been able to puzzle out.

I will accept only one use for grapefruit and that is shampoo ingredient.

One whiff of that gaggingly astringent odor and the dirt hiding in your overgrown follicles will beg for mercy.

These days my hair is much shorter.

As it turns out women are only into long hair on themselves and on romance novel covers. Real life guys not so much.

But if you need a real clean, go with one that smells like it could curdle battery acid. Go with one that smells like grapefruit.