The Ex

After learning that I work with computers, my driver shifts his line of questioning towards how someone might get something pulled from the internet. Apparently his ex-girlfriend posted some scandalous stuff about him on a website geared towards exposing rip-offs and he’s been trying to scrub his reputation clean since.

He asks whether it’d be worth hiring a hacker. He asks how politicians do it. He asks if it’s possible to get the revenge website indexed further down Google’s search results. Respectively, I tell him: It’d be like hiring a burglar. Politicians have quite a bit of money. He’ll need to make the news a few times, then create a website, Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter.

We pull over to pick up a woman from a laundromat. She walks to the car lugging a rack with four large bags full of clothes. My driver states politely that he can’t take all of her belongings because there might be passenger requests along the way. The woman gestures towards her largest bag and suggests in disjointed English (clearly not her first language) that it’s the only one she needs. My driver acquiesces, placing the sack in the trunk. As his back is turned, the woman quickly tries to throw her remaining three bags in the seat next to me. My driver, upset by her sneaky behavior, returns her bag, closes his trunk, and cancels her ride.

As we continue towards my destination, my driver sympathizes with the woman, he can understand the appeal of trying to shave a few dollars off of an Uber fare by requesting a pool instead of an X. Her tactics probably pay off on most days.