It’s been about a decade since HBO aired the last episode of a show called Taxicab Confessions, in which passengers would share their deepest, darkest secrets with cab drivers. Although the show is gone, its spirit lives on in a recent Reddit thread, where Uber drivers were asked to recount the secrets they’d overheard while picking up and dropping off passengers.
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The most popular story, from user westport76, is easily the most heartbreaking in the thread. It’s hard to imagine being in the car when something like this happens:
Former Uber driver here. Picked a girl up […] from a bar on a Wednesday night – absolutely hammered, about 10pm. She got into my car, apologized for being so drunk and politely asked if we could just drive around a little while, with the windows down.
I was prepping for a cleaning fee, trying to drive and pull a vomit bag out of the glove box, but no, she just did that airplane thing with one hand out the backseat window. She asked me if I had ever thought about dying, to which I replied, yeah – I guess so.
That’s when she told me that she had cancer. It was in her brain and it was too far gone to consider chemo. I remember my heart just pounding. She told me she was dying and she was going to be okay. Tonight she was celebrating with her work friends who threw her a going-away party. She told them she was taking a position abroad.
“I just didn’t tell them that abroad was heaven.”
We often hear stories about Uber drivers acting inappropriately around their passengers, but stories about Uber drivers in danger don’t seem to crop up quite as often. Maybe that’s what makes this comment from asudan30 so terrifying:
Drove UBER one night… it was pretty tame until I picked up two guys who wanted to go to a strip club 40 miles away. As they requested an UberSelect fare I was happy to drive that far. ($80-100) It took them 15 minutes to get ready and into the car and they seemed cool so I wasn’t worried.
As soon as we got on the freeway the guy in the passenger seat started asking about UBER driving and things got dark. After a few minutes he started saying s*** like “what would you do if someone just grabbed the steering wheel and ran the car into the median” and “have you ever thought about what would happen if someone in the back seat tried to strangle you while you were driving?” I got a little freaked out and tried to lighten the mood by asking what they were celebrating, etc, but the one guy just kept at it.
I was happy to get to the strip club and get them the hell out of the car. Bonus was the bouncer at the club gave me $40 for dropping them off there. I never drove UBER again. F*** that.
Here’s a slightly less frightening story from user Aquamaniac7:
My friend Ubers in my hometown. Picked up some really nice girls out on First Friday. They’re talking about their plans for next autumn. Guy thinks he recognizes one of them, turns out to be my younger sister and he tells me all about it. And that’s how I found out my little sister was moving to Spain.
And finally, user blamethecranes was disappointed that the thread wasn’t actually about deep-sea discoveries:
I thought the prompt read, “Scuba divers, what’s the deepest secret you’ve uncovered?” and I’m slightly disappointed this is not what I came into.
It’s an absolutely fascinating thread — be sure to check out the whole (NSFW) thing on Reddit.
