Lets go back to the last time I worked for Lyft in 2019; It was a Friday night towards the end of December 2019. I was on my 5th or 6th ride of the night, it was around midnight or so and I was in the middle of bumble fuck nowhere! To be act it was somewhere near Tracey, Ca and I had just dropped off my last rider.
Up to this point nothing out of the ordinary had occurred; several drunk business men going out to get more drunk, a young lady who’s boyfriend was supposed to be getting out of jail before Christmas but from what I heard (loud and clear) this was not going to be the case due to a scheduling issue and my last ride was one of those non-talker types. I dropped my last ride off and my Lyft app gave me some vague message about how I had to contact the main office about an issue. And that was it….I could not call anyone, all I could do was send in request via the app and wait. So I did and waited, and after about 30 minutes of searching the site and the internet on what I needed to do I just decided to make the hour and half ride home; confused and frustrated.
By the time I got home I had gotten an email from a customer service rep that basically stated that one of my passengers had reported that I was intoxicated. My first reaction was of disbelieve, mainly because the first thought that crossed my mind was ‘Wait, a taxi app company gets a report that one of their drivers is operating a vehicle intoxicated and their one and only response is to turn off the drivers app….and that was it?!?!?!’
If I was drunk/high/impaired turning off my app, by no means, was going to stop me from driving, it just stopped me from using the app. So hypothetically I was now going to have to drive 58 miles back home drunk?!?! And what was their response? Send an officer to verify this information was correct, to get a potentially dangerous situation under control and or to check on the welfare of an employee that might be having some other underlining issues? NOPE, it was to turn off the app, send a copy and paste response to the driver and wait about an hour to send an email. This my friends was a huge missed opportunity on the part of Lyft as a company.
It falls into soo many categories it is hard to say which one was, or is, more important. I did finally get a call from the service rep later, like 12 hours later, and we spoke at length about the situation. I was not intoxicated at the time the infraction was reported; however, I was drunk at the time the call came in ha! We spoke about the event and since my track record with them of three years is damn near perfect he felt that was reported in error. I did make a point to tell him how this was super irresponsible on the part of Lyft on how this was handled. For one this could have been a public relations nightmare if a driver had been drunk and it got out that all they did was turn off their app with no real life follow up…Calling the cops! Fuck, they have my exact location at all times while I have the app running! Luckily this situation was not one that ended in an accident or incident, it only ended with an irate end user. The other thing I pointed out was that I would be very interested in the person who reported me, do they have a history of making reports like this?
The last passenger I dropped off was a rather big fare and if it was that person that reported it I am pretty sure Lyft refunded them their money. Can you smell scam? I sure can! The Lyft rep really could not go into details about that, which I knew, I just wanted to see if there was any standard practices around these type of inquiries. And from his response I got the feeling the actual investigation side of this occurrence was that there is very little done, it would take too much time and effort. We live in the day and age of do it now, do it fast and next…..
This whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth, even though I was cleared and my app was reinstated but this is on my record and I do not feel any real due diligent was done here. And even to the point, what if I was drunk and I just got away with it??? (For the record I was NOT).
We were set to go on a three week vacation not long after this so I just kind of let it go and by the time we go back to our normal grind I just went back to driving. I have thought about reaching out to them about this but the last time I reached out to them about an issue I got the canned response ‘Thank you for reaching out to us….’ No follow up, even after several attempts I was never able to get any traction on the situation.
That situation I will be putting down here as well, and it will be ‘Missed Opportunity #2’. This again was another situation where Lyft could have done something a little bit more proactive than reactive but as of now….no dice
But for now lets just leave this story as is, and remember to share share share the world around, take pictures and tells us your story; we will read it!