Uber-excited by the daily commute

It took me a while to take the Uber route - but now there’s no turning back.

‘Uber drivers are bursting with joie de vivre and the novelty of the enterprise.’ Picture: Ivan Rachman.

For someone who spends an inordinate amount of time fiddling with apps on his iPhone, I was something of a late adopter of the Uber revolution. I followed its rise and rise with interest, but I could never seem to get around to downloading the thing, and the thought of having to register a credit card … well, it just kept rattling around in the virtual too-hard basket.

After all, there were taxis for getting from A to B. How different could Uber really be? Then, two weeks ago, I grasped the nettle and decided to embrace the biggest thing in modern transport advancement since magnetic levitation.

Suddenly, the scales were lifted from my eyes, my heart was filled with revolutionary zeal and I was suffused with the amazed and grateful belief of the new convert. The app itself was efficient and simple enough to be idiot-proof — you put in your address, then your destination, jab the “Uber X” button and at once a swarm of little cars is buzzing around on your smartphone’s map. Within minutes one of them pulls up outside your abode, ready to whisk you to where you want to go, by the best route Google Maps can cough up.

On arrival, the rummage for the wallet would begin, and then be aborted as I remembered this was the brave new cashless society on wheels.

But it wasn’t the cool design or simplicity or superb functionality of the app that set me on the road to Damascus, or at least Sydney’s Surry Hills, each day. Nor was it the few dollars one could supposedly save compared with the same trip in a metered taxi. It was the drivers and their sparkling new and perfectly maintained chariots.

Most taxi drivers are a miserable breed. If they talk at all, it’s to gripe about how business is down, complain about the weather or launch into a diatribe that conflates politics, religion and other subjects best not broached in polite company. Many of them have been at it forever, and they have become jaded and devoid of joy.

Uber drivers, however, are bursting with joie de vivre and the novelty of the enterprise. They are in love with their cars — to a vehicle, they have all been machines of a dream, such clean machines, with the pistons a-pumpin’, and the hubcaps all gleaming.

I actually found myself looking forward to the 20-minute trip to work, in the company of interesting and intelligent fellows, many of whom weren’t in it for the money as much as the fellowship and the sheer enjoyment of tooling around town in their ride of choice with a changing retinue of interlocutors.

There was the Egyptian immigrant in his Honda Jazz who gave me a Milky Way bar with a smile as we discussed the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s future as a secular state and the claustrophobia of crawling into the inner chambers of the pyramids.

There was the jovial “yeah bro” Polynesian man mountain in his jet black, pimped out and jacked-up Jeep Grand Cherokee. He was a hail damage specialist, one of the few, and business was good. He filled me in on the finer points of filling out each lump and bump caused by the damaging icy projectiles. As he spoke, his phone kept ringing but he declined to answer it. “My fiancee. Might get a bit X-rated, eh bro.”

There was Zorba the Greek, as I dubbed him, with a long white beard and a few white wisps plastered over his shiny dome, in his late model Toyota Camry. “Greece,” he announced, “isn’t called Greece by us Greeks. It’s Helos.” I hadn’t raised the subject but between Glebe Point Road and Holt Street we managed to discuss classics and philosophy, with a little detour into the art of Goya, and his black vision of Saturn Devouring One of His Children. “Ah, but Saturn was Chronos to us Greeks,” cautioned Zorba.

That was just the warm-up for the following day, when an earnest ex-naval officer with the Player’s Navy Cut beard still in place and a vague tang of the briny still about him informed me from behind the wheel of his BMW X3 that he was a paid-up member and president or secretary of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Foundation, with a fine line in “smashing Trots”, a fondness for the theories of Max Weber, and a firm belief that the revolution was coming.

And there was a cherubic, soft-spoken Tibetan from Lhasa in a white BMW X1 who from exile in India founded and ran, with the Dalai Lama’s cousin, the Tibetan Review.

Even as I was getting to grips with Uber, the app was evolving, birthing its new and largely untested baby brother, Uber Eats. I look forward, in the very near future, to a pizza with pepperoni and Philosophy 101, or some souvlaki with a spot of history from my old mate Zorba.