Bargaining With Your Lyft Driver

April 14, 2023 8:02 AM

They almost did a car swap! This guy's account of a long, strange exchange with his Lyft driver in Las Vegas is funny and delightful.
posted by AnneK (10 comments total)

I feel like a story about a Vegas Lyft driver and his hustle could have gone to much weirder places. Also, someone should be pitching that angle to Hollywood as a modern Taxi Driver. And that thought led to the theme from Taxi drifting through my brain.

It's Friday morning, no one else is in the office yet, I need coffee.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:24 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is very Night on Earth.
posted by oulipian at 8:33 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

“Tempting. It’s a lot of fun chatting with you. And I appreciate the hustle.”

“Always being hustling.”

“Actually, it’s always be closing.”

Well actually, it's "Every Day I'm Hustlin'."
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:02 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is like longform McSweeney's!
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 9:24 AM on April 14, 2023

Dammit he should have said yes!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:44 AM on April 14, 2023

the bit before the old movie tie is amazing:

“I can drive it now. My mechanic gave me a straight pipe.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like a heart bypass for your car’s engine.”

“Are you a cardiologist?” he asked.

“No. Are you?”

“No, man, I’m a Lyft driver, and when I’m not driving, I’m studying business.”

I mean, trading a high milage Volkswagen for a Toyota would be a terrible decision.
posted by zenon at 11:41 AM on April 14, 2023

“Would you want it? Before you answer, keep in mind that thieves specifically target the Prius because it’s so easy to steal the catalytic convertor.”

It's not so much that the catalytic convertors on Prius are easy to steal but that they—especially those from specific years of Prius—contain significantly greater amounts of the precious metals than do typical catalytic convertors.

"The Times says that while a converter from an F-150 can fetch $150, a Prius converter can get a person more than $1,000. "
posted by bz at 11:55 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

My brother-in-law drives Lyft & Uber in Myrtle Beach and I would be safe betting that his conversations are even stranger. Dude looks like Santa Claus, ex-Marine, enjoys twitting Trump voters in Myrtle Beach which is basically a death wish but he's a good old Southern boy so he gets away with it, and I dated him before my sister did and before she and I both married other people.
posted by Peach at 4:00 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Years ago my wife and I got into an Uber in LA and his first words as we started driving were “are you familiar with the solo works of Mark Knoefler?” He then put on his duets CD to “ease is in” and talked about how amazing they were and wondered if there wasn’t some sort of romantic thing between him and Emmylou Harris and if there wasn’t he didn’t want to know!

We still aren’t entirely sure he wasn’t Mark Knoefler.
posted by misterpatrick at 8:59 PM on April 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

Years ago my wife and I got into an Uber in LA and his first words as we started driving were “are you familiar with the solo works of Mark Knoefler?” He then put on his duets CD to “ease is in” and talked about how amazing they were and wondered if there wasn’t some sort of romantic thing between him and Emmylou Harris and if there wasn’t he didn’t want to know!

had basically this same experience except it was a Lyft in San Francisco and the solo artist in question was John Lennon, now I want to see the Venn diagram of rideshare drivers/solo album enthusiasts
posted by taquito sunrise at 7:57 PM on April 16, 2023