The following will be an insight of almost monumental obviousness: The problem with tech is not tech, it is how “tech” forces us to put tech above people.
In the past, when I have spent several months in Johannesburg I would rent a car and get used to driving on the left side of the road.
With this short stay, I figure it will be safer if I just Uber around.
Yesterday a young man named Tadias got me from school back home. He started his day late at 10:00, not 8:00, because his three-year-old son was sick and he needed to be with him. Covid has been tough, he told me, because lockdowns meant he could not drive for several months and his wife, who is a chef, could not work at the restaurant either. You could hear the difficulty in his voice.
That was around 7:00 PM, when he dropped me off.
As he drives away I start to tip him on the app. This does not work. “There is a problem, try again later,” I am told.
Why the tip mechanism did not work on this trip (after working on others) is a mystery but in trying to fix it I end up in one of those on-line loops Kafka would think too nightmarish for fiction.
I enter my password at least 10 times, clear the cache on my phone (as instructed to do at one point), get routed to the “did you find this page helpful”pages (No!!!) and Googled the problem to discover other people have had it too. When I write an email to an adress Uber provides I get a response (see screen shot below) telling me I’ve contacted an email adress that is “not monitiored.”
Thanks, Uber.
Uber would save both Tadias and myself time if I could take an hour of his driving time so he could stay with his son. Surely that would be less frustrating than the hour I spend going from “we don’t monitor the emails” to the page that says “we’re here to help.”
Where is “here” exactly? And can we agree you help only up to a point?
Likely all of this has to do with the fact that I have a SiM card with a an African number and an account with a Dutch number. But surely I cannot be the first person in the history of Uber who's landed in a place they did not want to drive and so used a tourist card in their phone. And, anyway, the Uber experience works otherwise. Somehow “the system” understands that I have a new phone number when the money goes to Silicon Valley but not when I just wanna tip the guy who's actually doing the work.
This is not a first world problem. It is a division between first and third world problem. Because whatever is getting focused on at Uber it sure isn’t equity.
Indeed, looking this tipping problem up online and finding that other people struggled with it means Uber is happy to let this problem persist. How come?
(In the threads of those commenting about this, I discovered lots of attacks on people like me. “Just have cash, you jerk” is essentially what we are told. O.K. Happy to have the trolls teach me the evil of my ways. I guess I should have cash backup for the system that is all about not having to have cash in the first place. Like, if, in the future, my driver does not know where to go, I’ll make sure to bring a fold out map. Still, why can’t the billion dollar corporation do better too?)
Today, finally, something works and I can leave a gratuity for Tadias. Here I discover Uber has set a limit on how much you can tip a driver. No doubt they have this same policy for their executives, wherever they are.