I Like This Lady

I like this lady.  She’s from Inner Mongolia.  A self proclaimed part-time Uber driver, she’s aggressive and she doesn’t seem to care at all about traffic rules.  The chance that we’ll be back ended goes up, certainly.  But the likelihood of this is small where as the hastening of our arrival time, is all but certain.  She’s not missing any opportunities to get us there ahead of time. 

Most drivers won’t head over into the breakdown lane to pass cars.  There are cameras and you’ll probably get a fine in the mail, unless you have diplomatic plates or army plates or you just don’t give a shit.  Those exceptions sum up to about one fifth of the cars in Beijing.  If you’re with a law abiding driver you have to reckon with a steady stream of exceptional people speeding passed while you crawl ahead, in a law abiding fashion.  Tickets apparently do not concern my Inner Mongolian friend.  She is maximum opportunistic, maximum aggressive, cutting in to every opportunity that presents itself for her to overtake another vehicle.  As a passenger with little to no liability this is fine for me.

She had a garment business.  It failed.  Low barriers to entry, one presumes in the Chinese garment trade. So she took to driving.  She seems pretty self possessed and unassailable, but I’d be worried for her I suppose, if she were my wife, or my sister.  Uber pays pretty well, she says.  I wonder how it is they can contract with all these people part time.  There must be something very creative going on with Chinese labor laws.  I’ll need to look that up. 

You’re not supposed to tip with Uber but I give her another ten kuai anyway. “Thanks.  I like the way you drive.”  “She was glad for this briefly.  And then she sped off, rather quickly.  Inside the Westin hotel I tried to maintain my conference call while we awaited the arrival of the person we were to meet.  We sat down in the coffee shop and finished the call.  Someone must have been laughing, I imagined: “will we really get away with this?”  This when you can charge people twenty-seven dollars for two cups of coffee.   And they don’t even taste good.