Sting Operation

It was late one Friday night in December 2018 while I was driving for a ridesharing app. I had Fridays and Saturdays off on my regular job so I would drive for a ridesharing service to make some extra money and encounter interesting people so I could have some good laughs and stories to tell. It was like being paid to hang out. Most of my encounters with customers were good, but sometimes unfavorable events would happen that would make me feel like cancelling my driver account with the ridesharing service that I used. That Friday night in December was such a night.

I drove during the Evening time. It was a cold winter night. I was glad that my car had a good heater. My night was going good so far. Around 11:30 pm I got a pick up at the local train station to go across the river. I figured that it would be my last run for the night before I went to sleep. When the customer approached I let them into my car. I asked if the temperature inside the car was fine and how they were doing. The customer seemed to have a lot of interesting stories to tell especially about her husband and how he convinced a mugger to return his money to him. It was a good conversation. When we approached the destination, she asked me to accept the cash tip that she had to offer and it was $2 so I accepted it, then called it a night.

I went home and fell asleep. I decided to sleep in on Saturday morning only to wake up to notifications from the ridesharing app concerning my last trip the night before. They reprimanded me for taking the cash tip as they made a new policy that cash tips would no longer be allowed. I was ignorant of the new rule and told them what happened. They gave me a warning to not ever do it again and thanked me for being honest.

When I went back to my regular job when the new week began, I took the two dollars I got as a tip and told some of my team members about it and offered the money to them. One of my team members took a dollar and used it at the vending machine in the cafeteria, while the other one taped the dollar to his cubicle and left it there for months. To me, those two dollars were dirty and were not worth keeping. It looked like it was a sting operation for $2.