Chronicles of Peppy

Volume Two

Yeah, I know. I promised a tome about my car. But there has been a lot of existential dread to swim through; plus, who wants to read a living elegy for a Eco-friendly car when there are Marines in the streets of Los Angeles and the New York subway is flooding… again.

Peppy and I began are twelve year relationship a year after I got divorced. Some men when they get divorced buy a convertible and get a spray tan, but I bought a hatchback Prius and started driving Lyft.

My neighbor with the ukulele who I was fooling around with at the time (news flash, it didn’t work out) said I was nuts when I pulled into the car park in my Toyota Prius C with the stickers still in the window.

She wasn’t wrong.

And for the record, one of those stickers was in the lower right side of the windshield till very recently. What can I say, I am sensitive to change.

I much prefer to identify the worst rut and dig in. And then when the rut becomes extra rut-ish I declare how dedicated I am to no one in particular.

Speaking of ruts…

Driving for Lyft in those days involved attaching a furry pink mustache to the front bumper of your car. The problem with driving the roads of LA with a four foot long pink mustache attached to the front of your car in those days was that it subtly announced to the Cab-mafia that you were the harbinger of doom…

That you were the one coming for their cab medallions…

Cabbies didn’t appreciate tech disrupters and gig workers teaming up to make them obsolete and because of that slight would often cut you off, give you a love tap, or slice your tires.

These were some of the reasons why I kept my furry pink ‘stache on the dash.

Ride-sharing was like a lot of things that start in California. It started with a bang loud enough to bring forth the hungry masses. People made a lot of money for a short while. And then it got flooded by idiots and opportunists, generated side businesses that were unscrupulous at best, and ended with a cavalcade of lawsuits and people beating themselves and their work horses to death for pennies.

But these were the golden days when you had to try hard not to make fifty bucks an hour. Which is why I stood firm to my ukulele neighbor who I was messing around with when she wondered if it was sane to finance 25,000.

To put the boom in context, let me share one story. Lyft was engaged in a legal dispute with the taxi cab lobby, LAX, and the city of LA over the ability to operate at the airport.

It was a battle ground!

And why? Well. The airport was the castle keep for cab companies where they were going to make their last stand. And they were not going to go down without a fight. Cab companies, if you don’t know, are often places to wash cash. So, they had bags of it. Lyft had bags of Venture Capital. Both sides had powerful friends. And what was at stake? The two hundred thousands of people trying to get to the airport every day.

It was a classic old world squaring off against new world scenario that has repeated in our society for the past twenty years as Silicon Valley and it’s genetically altered offspring take over everything and make the world in their own twisted image.

The point is - it was a show down. And me and Peppy were pawns.

We were told on text blasts from Lyft, emails, and even in our Facebook group chat - that we absolutely can drop people off at the airport. And if we were intercepted by a cop and our car was impounded, they would absorb the cost and pay us for time.

How could I not see it was a sting operation. My customer had no intention to go anywhere. He didn’t even have luggage. And he was a chatty little bitch. Jail house snitch that he was, he fled the scene as the dragnet of motorcycle cops surrounded me and Peppy - and the gauntlet closed in.

How did they know? I didn’t even use the pink ‘stache?

They didn’t cuff me but it was a four hundred dollars to get the car out of impound and another two hundred for the citation. But the most ironic part? I had to take a cab home while they waited for poor Peppy to get processed and spend her night in the clinker.

And Lyft paid for all of it. Like that!

When I signed the release form at the po-po station, I asked the duty officer (who had his own cop mustache that wasn’t pink) how often this was happening?

His answer? Every twenty minutes or so.

In other words, big money was on the table. And Peppy and I were lambs to the slaughter.

It wasn’t our first brush with the law in service of corporate greed disguised as a fun work experience for artsy people looking for flexibility. But I’ll save that for another day. Besides, I don’t want to start shit-bagging on Uber … yet.