cape-town-people-2

I'm leaving my apartment. There's a lady inside, also leaving. She tells me she is trying to order an Uber, but she only has wifi in her apartment and then she can't find the uber on the street.

I offer to make her a hotspot. I'm kinda late for the thing I'm going to, but I turn on my hotspot and show her the QR code. She doesn't know what to do with that. She pulls out an ancient android tablet where every press has a delay. She doesn't know how to use it.

I give the SSID and password instead because QR code ain't happening. Click click click. Wait wait wait.

She tells me her bus is in 4 minutes and she's going to namibia. She can't miss it. I see the ride she was trying to call was R27 (1.5 USD). It's on some other ridehailing app I haven't heard of but her destination is just down the road. I say I can just call her an uber. It's R50, but whatever.

She asks me to make it a cash trip so she can pay the driver, but I know a lot of uber drivers won't accept cash trips and she'll take longer to find one. I tell her not to worry about it.

I go outside and wait for the uber so I can tell the driver it's not for me. She says she has to get her stuff quick. She goes to a garage and pulls out a literal shopping trolley packed with stuff. Then goes back to get more. There's a mountain of stuff on the pavement now. The driver arrives.

I apologize to him and say I don't know her and I thought she just wanted an uber. She tries to get me to drop her keys in a lockbox but I tell her I'm late and need to go. She hugs me in gratitude, and I leave them to sort it out.

As I walk to my meeting, I see the uber leave, so I assume they managed to come to an agreement and pack her stuff.

30 minutes later, the trip is still in progress. It goes on a detour and then stops. I try activate uber support but none of the options really fit for 'I'm not in the car and I called it for someone else and now I don't know what's happening any more'. So I leave it and hope for the best.

Eventually the ride ends and I get an updated charge of R120. I check my rating. It's gone down, but I think that's a conincidence because it only updates every week or something? I guess it's going down some more.