The Foggy Uber Ride

There are mornings that feel scripted by a tired playwright.

The kind where the alarm goes off too soon, the sky hasn’t decided what color it wants to be, and the world looks like it’s been wrapped in gauze. That morning, the city was swallowed whole by fog. Not the cinematic kind that looks romantic under street lamps. This was the kind that erased buildings. It turned headlights into floating orbs and reduced traffic lights to faint suggestions of authority.

I ordered the Uber early. Responsible. Disciplined. Night shift habits have trained me well. The app showed a silver sedan drifting toward me through the digital map, its tiny icon inching closer like a polite spaceship preparing for docking.

When the car arrived, it emerged from the mist as if it had been conjured. The driver looked calm but alert, the kind of focus you develop when you’ve spent years navigating unpredictable humans at unpredictable hours. I slid into the back seat, greeted him softly, and we began our quiet pilgrimage to work.

The fog was thick enough to muffle the world. Buildings blurred. Pedestrians appeared and vanished like ghosts late for appointments. The windshield wipers made a soft rhythmic sweep, not for rain, but for condensation that insisted on clinging to the glass. Every red light glowed like a distant ember. It felt less like commuting and more like traveling through a suspended dream.

Soon after the phone pinged and a second passenger entered. Quiet and subtle. Entering the vehicle as if to enter a theme park ride that’s fit for 2. So now it was three of us in the car. Driver in front. Two passengers in the back. The ride was calm. The fog made everything feel suspended, like we were traveling through a paused video game.

Then came the second pickup request.

One passenger.

We approached the location carefully, headlights slicing through mist that swallowed everything beyond a few feet. A person stood on the curb.

But as we slowed, that single silhouette fractured into three bodies.

Two young women and a guy. All swaying slightly. The kind of swaying that tells you they are still riding last night’s momentum. Laughter that didn’t match the hour. Energy that didn’t belong in the quiet of dawn.

The driver rolled down his window.

“Pickup for one?” he asked.

Before the intended passenger could answer, the two women surged toward the car.

“We’re getting in,” one announced, already pulling at the door.

“The ride is for one passenger,” the driver replied, calm but firm.

“There’s space for two more!” one of them insisted, gesturing dramatically at the empty seat beside us. “You can fit us.”

The logic was loose and soaked in alcohol.

The driver repeated himself. “It’s for one rider.”

And then came the line that confirmed just how intoxicated they were.

“If you pick up someone else after us,” one of them declared, phone already halfway raised to record, “we can just get out. Even if it’s on the highway.”

Even if it’s on the highway.

As if hopping out of a moving car at 60 miles per hour was just a flexible lifestyle choice. As if safety was a negotiable suggestion. As if highways were sidewalks.

Inside the car, the three of us exchanged the quietest, most collective thought: these women are not operating on planet Earth right now.

They doubled down.

“We’re lawyers,” one slurred with theatrical indignation, as though announcing a superpower. Phones came out fully now. Cameras recording. Narration began about “refusal of service” and “evidence.” It was less a legal strategy and more a performance piece titled Entitlement at Dawn.

The guy with them wedged himself near the door, holding it open just enough to prevent the driver from closing it. A human doorstop with bad timing.

The fog pressed closer around the car. Headlights from passing vehicles blurred into halos. The entire street felt like a courtroom built from vapor.

Minutes stretched. Five. Ten. Fifteen. It felt like twenty.

The co-rider who had been picked up earlier finally spoke. Calm, but louder now.

“This is our ride,” they said. “You didn’t order it. Let go of the door.”

That moment mattered. They weren’t random. They weren’t emerging from thin air. They had been in the car from the start, another witness to the absurdity.

The women kept insisting there was “room.” Kept repeating that they could “just leave on the highway” if anything changed. As if the driver’s car was a revolving nightclub booth instead of a moving vehicle in dense fog.

Their phones hovered, capturing nothing but their own escalation.

The driver stayed measured, but you could hear the strain under his voice. This wasn’t just an inconvenience. It was risk. Ratings. False claims. The modern gig economy’s version of walking a tightrope over a review section.

Eventually, their energy began to collapse under its own weight. The bravado faded. The recording stopped. The grip on the door weakened. Whether it was embarrassment, boredom, or the creeping realization that they sounded unhinged, they stepped back.

The driver cancelled the pickup.

We pulled away slowly, leaving the trio to dissolve into the fog like a bad decision fading at sunrise.

Inside the car, silence returned. Not the peaceful kind from earlier. The kind that follows a storm you did not consent to.

The driver exhaled.

“People think they can just do whatever,” he said quietly.

And maybe that was the real fog of the morning. Not the weather. The entitlement. The assumption that space equals permission. That volume equals authority. That intoxication equals invincibility.

We dropped off the co-rider first. A quiet thank you. A shared glance that said we survived that.

Then we continued through the mist until my building materialized ahead, slowly assembling itself from gray into solid brick reality.

I stepped out, thanked the driver sincerely, and watched the car disappear back into the haze.

It was supposed to be a simple ride to work.

Instead, it became a delayed grudge match fought in low visibility, starring two self-declared lawyers who believed highways were optional exits and capacity meant consent.

But I made it.

Through the fog. Through the standoff. Through the surreal theater of entitlement.

Sometimes the victory is small. You arrive. You clock in. You shake off the mist.

And you’re grateful that the only thing you carried out of that car was a story.