Diaries of an Uber Driver: My rider was almost committed for a psych eval.
"She's driving MY CAR!" The woman, blood-soaked and screaming, struggled fiercely against the gurney straps. Then, the pointing finger; she'd worked an arm free and started pointing at me. "And- and- she's a LESBIAN!"
It was after 2AM, and a ditched date had given me a front-row seat to a show of absolute madness.
The call started out as the typical date-turned-ditched-drunk; some guy leaned in, instructed me to take his ditched bad date home, and packed her into the car tottering drunk. While most of these women pass right out and remain asleep until they are roused and asked to leave the car, some of these riders are not as easy to deal with. One surprisingly common thing is for drunks to start accusing their driver of stealing //their// car and kidnapping them. This is one of those stories.
She was wearing a black cocktail dress, her date was incredibly polite and apologetic, and her destination was to some expensive condoplex several miles away. Halfway through the ride, she perked up and demanded to know why I was driving her car.
Me: "I'm an Uber driver, we're in my Nissan Versa."
Her: "No, you're driving MY car. Where are you taking me?"
Me: "Home; your date booked this ride from [Unnamed Restaurant]."
Her: "You took my car! Why are you driving MY car?"
-- Rinse, and repeat, this same argument for about ten minutes.
We eventually pulled into the parking lot of a condoplex so massive, I thought I'd pulled into the back end of a facility or hospital. The parking decks alone rose up several floors. I put the car into park. "Why are you driving me in MY car?!" I peered back into the seat and watched her throw open my back door. She took one step out and immediately face-planted straight into the asphalt.
I stepped out and ran up to the woman, who sat sobbing. She'd landed on her face, garnering a nasty nose bleed and a few facial cuts gushing blood onto the asphalt. She started patting her hands into what had become a pool of blood that splashed with each smack of a palm, and wiped it onto her face. I called 911 and pulled out a few loose heavy-duty paper towels from my emergency kit, and gave them to the still-crying woman. She got up, bolted over to what she insisted was "her car," and knocked the purse over. Her stuff rained onto the floor of my car, rolling off the seat and dropping out onto the floor mat.
Eventually, a fire truck stopped short in the street after their third trip around the block. It was then that I learned that the men I had been talking to were the first-responders enroute to the location; Atlanta 911 call center staff have the option of putting first-responders directly on the line to assist callers.
Moments later, a Grady EMS crew of two arrived. My rider started protesting to the medics and fire staff that my car was hers. Now soaked with blood and still sitting in my car, she refused to leave. The medics pulled the stretcher up to the car and the woman pulled the door shut, wiping her blood all over the interior handle panel. Lovely night indeed.
The woman tried locking the back doors, which one of the medics easily undid via my driver-side controls as the other medic pulled her out and onto the stretcher. "You either come with us, or we can have the police take you to jail." Protest over.
I started cleaning up my car while the medics busied themselves with both paperwork and the woman, who would not stop insisting that I had stolen her car. I stepped up and relayed the story of her ride. "We see this all the time," one medic said, strapping the protesting woman onto the gurney.
As the gurney was almost in the ambulance, the woman had thrust her arm out to point at me, protesting anew. One fed-up medic issued a threat: "We can take you in for a psychological evaluation, to the ER, or home. Do we need to take you in for a psych eval?" The woman fell silent, shocked, then started giving directions to her condo.
Her purse contents, and blood, were still in my car. It took me an hour to clean my car and find the EMS crew to turn the purse contents over to her roommate at the condos.
Welcome to the night shift.
*PS - I never did charge the woman a cleaning fee, out of kindness.