I feel bad about Uber Eats

I am always open to the possibility that I am old fashioned, but when did we get to be so lazy that we decided it was a good idea to put dinner in a cab?

I am usually the last one to get on board with almost anything, admittedly. iPhones, Mare of Eastown; Uber itself. Using Uber in Manhattan always seemed a little extra to me. “You know if you walk out onto the street and hold up your hand, a cab will just stop for you…” I would remark, certain that my wit was poignant and ripe as Camembert.

If Uber had come first and then one day, there was a secret clutch of cars all painted the same color that would pull over and take you where you were going, (except Jersey… or maybe the Bronx,) I think we would be living in a different world. The trick is being the new kid on the block.

We are being sold everything constantly. You are nodding knowingly, (at least that’s how I nod,) because you already know that, and we tell ourselves that we succumb to it, only ironically. Every part of our way of life is the brainchild of marketing people. The engine that drives literally everything is people buying shit and the gas in the tank of that engine is the sexy gloss of perception. I wasn’t even going to go here, but just now – above, my computer autocorrected Iphone to iPhone and I thought oh, fuck you then. When did everything get so damn cool? Where was I? And why does an iPhone cost $800? And what are we prepared to do about it?

Well, finance it naturally.

Years and years ago when I lived in Connecticut there was an early iteration of Uber Eats (Oh is that one word? Apparently not,) called, get this… Bring Me My Dinner. Let’s give it an exclamation point… Bring Me My Dinner! Yeah, that sounds right.

It’s so very Westport, Connecticut that you can do the voice in your head.

Anyway, this was a little startup company that partnered with local restaurants, one of which I worked at. They would leave their own special take-away cartons behind and some lost looking, frazzled guy would show up and stand in the kitchen and wait for the food to be packed up. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now. And I know that’s about me. If I want something I am happy to go get it. That’s not because I am born and bred of some hard-working salt of the Earth, New England stock – (I am though,) I just know that it will always turn out wrong and I have been proven right time and again.

The first time I used Uber Eats, we were deep in the quarantine days. It was my job to go downstairs and meet “the guy,” and until then I had not given a single thought to what exactly was going on. It was the depth of the pandemic and I guess I thought maybe it was “a thing.” A muscular looking dude was double parked in a BMW, some chick in the front seat. He mumbled a name, I nodded and he handed me a bag of food. I watched him drive off. I looked around self-consciously. 

Had I just bought drugs?

Who was the girl? Was she his ride or die? His ride and deliver?!

“So wait,” I said when I got upstairs, “Some Uber driver just picked up our food and brought it to us?” I had put my Pad Thai in an Uber. I felt ridiculous. 

“Well, they’re in Washington Heights and they don’t deliver here, you wanna walk?”

My mouth was already full so I couldn’t answer.

(The place we are talking about here has the best Thai chicken wings in Manhattan Kin Khao Thai. No seriously.

https://www.kinkhaothainyc.com/menu.aspx

But it has been mostly downhill from there. 

The Uber Eats guy is almost always running late, or they randomly change the time window and we end up yelling at our phone like we are watching some sci-fi death race across a dying planet. “It said ten minutes, now it says thirty minutes!” How quickly we turn on the Uber Driver as we watch the little blip on the screen… “What’s he doing now? Is he stopping? He’s turning. Why is he turning? The same way my son verbally abuses Alexa… “Turn off plug one …NOW!” [He has some pent-up shit going with Alexa.]

Once or twice they’ve been on a bike. You’re a fucking dick if you’re standing there on the sidewalk thinking about how you can’t wait until the gym reopens and this guy rode thirty blocks with your shrimp burrito. You can see it in their eyes too. “Bring me my dinner!”

One guy on a bike didn’t want to ride down my block because he had to head the other direction. So he was just stopped there. I got a text from my girlfriend upstairs – “He can’t see you – he’s on the corner.” Well, I’m right here…  I gotta walk to the corner? What’s up with this guy?

How quickly we get soft. 

The last time I played around with that nonsense I was waiting for my Thai wings and rice – (the spicy basil fried rice…) And a half an hour became an hour and things were looking kind of bleak. It was raining so we were being understanding, we’re not fucking savages over here. 

Finally the guy texted that he was downstairs because who has time for the buzzer in this crazy world we live in? We got back upstairs to find that we had the wrong food. We had someone else’s order.

Not only that…

Not only THAT – it was from some kind of vegetarian hell hole. Hearts sank even further as the pot luck began and I pulled from the soggy sack . . . some luke-warm samosas which were…okay. 

There was also something I dubbed the Salad of Tears with weird bitter lettuce and other stuff that tasted like vitamins. And to drink – two smoothies. Two very dense smoothies with what I believe was peanut butter protein powder. It took me two days to drink mine.

As I crunched my salad I wondered about the vegetarians who got my wings and my beloved spicy basil fried rice. Did they call and complain? I imagined maybe they weren’t vegetarians. I hoped that they were maybe just a couple of stoners who decided to be super healthy for a night and received for their efforts, the greatest wings in the world.

I hope they tipped the guy well.

I hope they were so high that they tried to order the wings from the vegetarian place the next time.

Bottom line, I wasn’t going to complain. I wasn’t going to say anything. I was just grateful that I had something to eat. And I appreciated the guy who had the shit job of running around the city bringing people like me who are only slightly luckier than him, their dinner. Because I have had many shitty jobs in my life if I am completely honest, and if you can sit in your apartment watching TV and wait for a complete stranger to show up at your house with dinner in a city where people are going hungry – remember that you have absolutely nothing to complain about.