I couldn’t believe it. Did my Lyft driver just call me lazy?

Let me add that this particular Lyft driver was actually driving me to work at the time as I sat in the back seat wondering whether gifting him with a low star rating at the end of this ride might improve his “friendliness” criteria.

He flipped his comment real fast though when I said, “excuse me?” from the backseat. Amid the whoosh of highway air through the open window and music from his radio, he probably didn’t think I heard his first response.

He was fast, but I was faster.

We’d been having what I thought was a friendly discussion about how I liked Lyft and how happy I was using Baltimore’s transportation system instead of investing in a car and driving myself where I need to go. Not that I believed that my decision to be a bus rider was any of his business, but I’m always up for polite conversation, a plus when your job is a 25 minute commute by car. So, we used that time to dissect my reasoning for choosing long waits in the hot sun for a bus, multiple transfers, periodical sprints to catch a bus, or worse yet: no shows.

• No monthly car/insurance payments
• No car maintenance worries
• The joy of letting a paid professional driver worry about the traffic
• The stress-free peace of listening to music, reading, or crocheting to/from work
• Extra exercise of moving vs. sitting
• My choice to invest my $$$ into more useful needs

That’s when “lazy” slid suggestively out of his mouth. I didn’t bother telling him that anyone who exerts the physical effort to get to/from a bus stop and the mental effort to patiently wait in the hot sun or cold air until it lumbers down the street could hardly be called lazy. I’m pretty sure he considered the prestige of jumping in a car, turning the key in the ignition and turning a wheel left and right while he piled on the pounds to be a much loftier choice.

Anyway, he recovered from his “lazy” comment with another insult, that if I had my own car, I wouldn’t have to depend on people to drive me everywhere.

Depend? Who is this guy? Depend on people? I struggled to keep my composure in the backseat as I listened incredulously to this Lyft driver that I was paying to take me to work – a point he obviously missed while he was busy insulting me for not having a car to get there on my own. Since we were halfway down the highway to my job, jumping out was out of the question. So ….

Calmly, I responded that I don’t depend on people to take me anywhere. I depend on bus drivers and Lyft drivers to do their jobs, which is to get paid to drive their customers where they need to go. When Baltimore gets rid of its transportation system, Lyft goes out of business, or I move to Mayberry then I’ll get myself a car.

That comment awarded me a moment of silence for about half a mile before he opened his mouth and allowed more ignorance to fly out about how late the busses always are, and how Baltimore’s new Link transportation system is worse than the old system. Since he’d already bragged that he hadn’t ridden the bus in years and we’d just passed the “Greenspring Avenue – 1 mile” sign, I let my silence signal the end of this unbelievable exchange hoping he might use that time to let it sink in that if EVERYBODY had a car, he’d be unemployed.

Four stars instead of five for you my dear Lyft driver, and I’m being generous.

So much for a stress-free ride.