Sweet Ride...

31 January, 2019

Mellow Mushroom

It’s not often that I get to go places by myself. I live in a driving city, not a lot of mass transit, so if I leave the house, I’m with someone who can drive. That’s convenient for some things, but there is a certain liberty of activity that people who can move independently take for granted. Right now, I’m sitting in a pizza shop waiting for a desperately needed post-work snack (I worked through lunch, as usual), and if I decide I want a coffee I can pack up and leave whenever I want. I don’t have to wait for someone else to get ready or for someone to come get me — there’s a coffee shop a block away. This city is too spread out for this to be the norm, but every so often I find myself set adrift by circumstances in one of the more “developed’ parts of town, and I like to take a moment to reflect on how much I enjoy this rare treat.

I don’t resent having to travel en masse. It has its advantages, and I dearly love the people I spend time with as a result of needing social chauffeurs. Quality time is my top love language and time spent in the car together definitely counts. But the freedom does appeal. This is why I was excited when I found out Uber had come to my city.

Then I found out it costs $50 or so to get from home to work.

Ok, Uber may be cheaper than a taxi but it’s not something I can budget for right now. But it’s there if I need it on an occasional basis, which I have a few times this last fall.

When I started my internship for my master’s program I decided I wanted to take Uber just once to make sure I was comfortable hailing a ride and getting from Point A to Point B, to make sure I could identify which car was mine, and make sure I practiced dealing with potential service dog issues. I wanted to be prepared in case there was a day that my husband couldn’t drop me off on his way to work, or if my friend had to cancel picking me up due to car trouble or something. And, as I have had to come to accept over the years, being blind takes practice. Dry runs are almost a necessity for new workplaces, new routes, new services of any kind.

Now, previously I had made some sort of comment about Uber on this blog to the effect of “I’ve heard a lot of bad stuff but that’s not what I’m writing about right now.” I’d like to respectfully tell my past self to stop offering opinions on things I haven’t personally experienced yet.

So, I set up my dry run.

I downloaded the app, asked my husband to set up my payment method because new credit cards no longer have raised numbers on them (more on that later?), and picked a location. I chose my favourite coffee shop in town, a familiar destination where I could decompress if the trip went badly, or celebrate if the trip went well. 

The app is perfectly accessible. There’s not a single jot of text that Voiceover won’t select and read. I had no difficulty putting in and saving my home location and choosing my test destination. I was able to read the price, estimated arrival time, and navigate to the safety section where I could call my driver. I read on a blog that it’s best to call and alert the driver in advance of having a service dog so no one’s caught off-guard. Uber is required to accept service dogs, but since we’re such a minority of the ride-hailing population it can smooth over surprise and concern if you tell people in advance.

I called my driver and told him that I would be traveling with my Seeing Eye dog. He said that was no problem, and that he, in fact, had signed up to be a pet-friendly driver. When he arrived, I received the notification and went outside. He was out of his car and called out to me to let me know where he’d parked, opened the car door for me and everything. Southern drivers are gentlemen :) it’s in their breeding, as they say.

The driver and I had a lovely conversation on the way to my coffee shop and he dropped me off right in front of the entrance. I call that a success. I even found out I can review, rate, and tip my driver from the app without any accessibility issues whatsoever.

Now, many of you may be thinking “stop gushing, clearly it was a good experience, but what’s the big deal?” Let me explain.

Technology has previously been more of a headache than a help to me, but it has been essential. Imagine that — an essential headache. I have come to expect technology to be only partially accessible, needing to cobble together multiple devices, and still having to ask someone to do one little bit of a task in order to accomplish things. To have a single app work from start to finish without a single hiccup is a HUGE deal for me. I’m afraid I don’t trust it to last. One update and all that accessibility could go away. It feels too good to be true, to have something just...work!

I found out Uber costs $50 from work to home when my ride home called me to tell me her sister had to go to the ER. “No problem,” I told her. “I’ll take an Uber!”

Once again, a flawless, if expensive, experience. And I even learned the name of a new classical guitar performer that I really, really love. Jesse Cook, if you like that kind of music.

My most recent Uber experience was above and beyond expectations. I had to go to a local conference for work about suicide prevention and school safety in public schools. Cheerful topic, no? Anyway, I whistled up my steed, as it were, and headed to the conference. The driver was not only perfectly civil and professional about my service dog, he even flagged down another conference attendee and asked if he could drop me near her so I could follow her to the entrance of the conference centre.

I  Don’t know a lot about Uber’s business model, but I’m happy to give them my business. I expect there are bad apples among the driving population down here, as there are in every population, but I am content to give Uber a Four Paws and a Tail rating.