It's 11PM on a Friday night. I am exhausted, drunk, and on an inopportune side of town. Ordering an Uber seems like the logical thing to do. That is, until I am politely alerted that my trip will incur "surge" costs, meaning that a ride normally valued around $7 is now, by some absurd stretch of an arbitrary and skewed supply vs. demand scale, three-and-a-half times that amount.
Luckily, Uber is a friendly little app, and doesn't want me to have to spend over 20 dollars to get a meager hop and a skip across a few highways. No. It wants me to have options. And so, it benevolently offers me the choice to pay a mere fraction of the surge price. The catch? "Share your ride!"
Okay, this can't be that bad, right? Other people are bound to be in similar states as me: tired and lazy, wishing ever so willfully for a jetpack. They'll be too tired for small talk, too awkward for eye contact, and let's be honest, probably too drunk for any and all of the socially accepted and unaccepted forms of interaction. I'll agree to "share my ride," and will likely enjoy sleepy silence for the duration of the trip.
I grin to myself and hit "request pool," confident that this will be a painless experience. And lo and behold, it is. A gangly teenager opens the door nervously, sits down, and stares straight ahead for the rest of the ride.
Uber Pool isn't bad, I conclude. It saves you money, takes only a few minutes longer, and gives you a funny anecdote the next day when you tell your friends about the weird teenager with cargo shorts that refused to even look in your direction.
But my next Uber pool experience is less forgiving. As is my next one. And the one after that. It seems like most people don't realize that they are agreeing to share their ride with an unknown party. They approach the car, see a stranger sitting in the backseat, wear an unpleasant mask of confusion, and check the license plate number meticulously before very cautiously opening the door. Sometimes, I have the misfortune of being in a car with tinted windows, so as to be the completely unexpected body on the other side of a door pulled open by someone whose sheer alarm and repulsion at the sight of an unforeseen human is detrimental to my self esteem.
But the really interesting times are those when people interact, like the time a couple gets in the car with me, and then graciously requests my migration to the front seat, just before asking the driver if he minds stopping at the bank so they can get cash for cigarettes. Then there is the time when I get into an Uber only to find two girls my age sitting in the back seat. They cast a look of disapproval in my direction, sigh with exacerbation, and say, "I guess we'll have to wait to finish our conversation." There's the time I bare witness to an intense flirtation between a fellow pooler and a driver; the time a passenger asks if he can touch my leather bag "because it looks so soft;" and even the time when a guy alludes to a bank heist he was involved in during the nineties, winks at me, and says "shh, don't tell."
And then there are rides that are magical, like the one Thursday night I swear myself, the driver, and my fellow pooler could have been best friends in a previous life. Or one late night drive during which my driver tells me about all the phone numbers exchanged in his backseat, the love he believes he's had a hand in kindling.
Uber Pool facilitates a multitude of interesting encounters, the reason being perhaps that it brings about an entirely new kind of interaction. No one is typically taking a cab home to socialize. In fact, cabs have always been regarded as private spaces for passengers; work often conducted in the backseat, makeup applied, daily naps taken. And yet we are tempted through the allure of 50% off or more to forsake that exclusive experience. What then do we find? Passengers still attempting to replicate that confidential environment, or otherwise embracing the awkwardness. Others see it as an opportunity to make friends, tell stories, find a dinner date for the following evening. Regardless of what you may find in your next Uber pool ride -- whether discomfort or philosophical conversation, a new friend or an embodiment of your disdain for humanity-- rest assured, you are a part of the new wave of urban transport; communal, inexpensive (for the time being), and always atypical.