Before Lyft and Uber, back in 2007-08 I worked for a DD startup called Zingo. Their pitch was you find yourself hammered at a bar with you car outside. Call Zingo, we dispatch a driver on a foldable two-stroke scooter. Pop it in the trunk, drive you home, and we disappear into the night. We had no app or even GPS nav (because I was in their car). I carried a Motorola radio and wore an orange safety jacket. Because it was explicitly a DD service and you had to have a car to start with, my customers were exclusively hammered, and it was a dark time for me to live through.

I took 5-15 people home each night, and saw exactly the characters this article described. I actually plan to write about this in more detail one day, but after reading this I can't help but share a few anecdotes.

On my very first night, very first pick-up, I puttered up to a steakhouse where a guy in a suit standing by a Mercedes waved at me and yelled "Zippy! Over here!" When we got in his car, the first thing he said is "you might as well put a fucking bullet in my head, 'cause I'm fucking dead when my wife hears that I just got fired." We don't provide that service, sir. The rest of the ride he told me about his leased AMG that I was driving and kept telling me to punch it every time we got a green light.

I had nightly drunk Adams that were too hammered to even give me directions home. One quest I went on with Adam was first to go get chicken wings at a restaurant that I knew was certainly closed at 3:30, a half-hour past last call. After driving for 20-30 minutes to go see the closed restaurant I convinced him we should get him home. Like most hammered drunk men, he was confident he could give me turn-by-turn directions. He alternated between directions and spontaneous ideas of other places we could go to get him something to eat, and finally blacked out cold. I pulled over and shook him trying to wake him up, but he would just groan and push me away. I dug out his wallet, got his license and took him to the address on it. Luckily it wasn't that far. I walked him to the door and kept asking him "This is your place, right? We're home, right?" "Mmmm nnggg." His key didn't work. He was so noisy that someone came to the door. Apparently an old roommate that knew where he lived now, I wrote down the directions and drove him there. When we got there he was so out-cold that I couldn't get him to wake up at all. I left him in the car and hid his keys in the mailbox.

Another story that sticks with me is a cantankerous old widow. I was dispatched to a fancy restaurant. Restaurant had called, not the customer, which is always a bad sign. When I arrived they were clearly in a dispute and she was angry that she had to leave. She didn't understand the concept of my job, and seemed to think I was some kind of escort or something. She didn't like my reflective orange jacket, "you really don't have anything nicer to wear? What kind of shirt do you have on under it?" She wasn't happy with my shirt either, so she said "fine, that'll have to do." I explained I was just taking her home. "Oh no you're not. Not yet". First I had to accompany her to the bar at another fancy restaurant. We charged by the hour and by the mile so, a stop along the way was technically part of our service if you wanted that. I felt beyond awkward as we walked to the door of this fancy place, me dressed like a street rat in a reflective jacket, and her a 60-70-year-old Miss Daisy, drunk as hell and ready to chew somebody out. By the grace of god, they wouldn't let me in because because of dress code.

I don't know how I feel about the effect of ride-share apps upon alcoholism, but I know that chronically interacting with drunks was one of the most degrading and demoralizing experiences I've had. I have many more awful stories. The girl that threw up all over the inside of her own car. The woman, a regular I often picked up with her husband, who I picked up with another man one night and she tipped me $100 not to say anything next time I picked her up with her husband. The disgustingly drunk and overweight big shots who were outraged that they'd just been rejected by a woman--usually the same guys that wanted to tell me about their AMGs and tell me to "punch it." Blacked out people that I didn't know how to get home. Lots of awful stories, but I'll afflict them upon the world some other day.