Neighborhood Botch
by Scott Hardie on March 10, 2025

I've heard that riding in the front seat of an Uber signals that you want to chat with the driver, and riding in the back seat means that you prefer silence. I always sit in the back.

But when I went to catch a ride from my house the other night, there was stuff in the van's back seat, so the front was the only option. As I squeezed in, the driver cheerfully asked, "Do you like the neighborhood?"

"Uh, yeah, I guess so," I said, still trying to get the seat belt on. The driver started rolling away.

As he drove, he kept muttering questions, increasingly quietly. Between his dwindling volume and Arabic accent, I couldn't really understand what he was asking, so I kept offering bland responses. "Uh huh." "Yeah." "Mmm."

After five minutes, there was at last a lull where he stopped muttering. To fill the silence, I elaborated: "This used to be a really quiet neighborhood. But since they connected the new bridge last year, traffic has gotten really bad here. There are just so many people now!"

At normal volume, the driver said, "Hey, I'm going to have to call you back. I have a passenger." And then he took the earbud out of his left ear.

We didn't talk for the rest of the drive.

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