I think it’s safe to say that pretty much everyone has used Uber. It’s certainly easy enough: link up a credit card, set your pickup and drop-off locations, and voila! You’re off to your destination in Vlad’s gray sedan. When you arrive at your location and wave goodbye to Vlad, a pop-up within the Uber app suddenly appears, asking you to “Rate Your Ride” on a scale of one to five stars. If you’re not like me, you quickly evaluate factors such as car cleanliness and the overall experience, click a rating, and get on with your life. If you are like me, you stare at those stars for what feels like an eternity, rationalize to the point of excusing anything that was wrong with the drive, and always give five stars.
It’s not like I don’t know what qualifies as real five-star Uber service. Here’s how I would describe it. The driver arrives on-time at the prescribed pickup location. After a kind “hello, how are you?” the driver double-checks my drop-off location and we don’t talk for the rest of the ride. Nice tunes are bumpin’ on the radio. As long as it isn’t country music, this remains five-star service.
On the other hand, we have non-five-star service.. The driver arrives much later than the projected time, like a full 20 minutes later. The driver calls and directs me to walk to where they’re parked, blocks away, because it’s not like I set my location in the app or anything. The car is dirty inside and outside, and smells like cigarette smoke. The actual driving part feels like Fast & Furious. Country music is blaring as I try to keep my nausea to a minimum.
The latter scenario is clearly not five-star service. And it definitely happened to me. But I can’t not give five stars. I would feel so incredibly guilty about it for the rest of my life. I mean, what if they’re having a really bad day? What if they have a family to support? What if no one told them life was gonna be this way, clap clap clap clap?
I guess in the end, this is all just a selfish attempt for me to feel like I’m a moral person. Knowing that I contributed to the downfall of a driver’s average rating with one careless little tap would weigh on my conscience for the rest of my life! Why not save myself the endless torture? They get five stars, I feel like a caring and upstanding citizen; two birds, one stone.