Ride share story #100

 Today I picked up a passenger and we started talking about what counts as high-adrenaline—what people actually do versus what they imagine doing. He mentioned that at his warehouse job, a lot of workers can’t even go up on the high scaffolding, not because they don’t want to work, but because they’re too fearful.

That stuck with me.

So I asked him, what’s the most high-adrenaline thing he would do?

He said, “Roller coasters.”

I laughed inside. Nothing is more funny than seeing adults say they’re fearful of roller coasters, as if that’s the only thing they could come up with at this point in life.

Not skydiving. Not anything extreme. Just roller coasters.

He laughed and said, “I have to be pushed out of a plane to skydive,” like no one really chooses that in a normal moment.

And that opened the door to a story I probably didn’t think through before telling.

I told him about an earlier passenger I’d had—a woman who had been in the army. She told me about people she served with who had to jump out of a helicopter during a mission. One of them… their parachute didn’t open.

She died.

I kind of regretted saying that in that moment, so I said, “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to scare you.”

But he just shrugged it off. Said he wasn’t planning on jumping out of a plane anytime soon anyway.

Then he started talking about his dad.

His dad had been in a war too. He was on an aircraft that went down, and afterward, he had to pull his fellow soldiers out—people with broken legs, broken limbs. Real, physical damage.

And somehow, his dad talked about it like it was just something that happened. Like it was survivable. Like it was… handled.

But then he said something that lingered.

That a lot of the people who came back from war weren’t really okay.

After I dropped him off, the car got quiet again.
That kind of quiet doesn’t last long in this job.

My next passenger got in, and the tone shifted almost immediately. We started talking about school—specifically women trying to get into med school. She was weighing her options, thinking about what it would take, where she could go.

And without really planning to, I found myself giving advice. Talking about alternative paths, even mentioning places like the Cayman Islands, how people find their way into careers through routes that aren’t always the obvious ones.

It was such a different kind of risk.

Not jumping out of planes.
Not pulling people out of wreckage.

Just… choosing a path and hoping it works.

And then there’s this other part of the job that doesn’t really fit into any of that.

Like the gas station.

There’s this weird, almost cinematic moment where you’re just standing there as an Uber driver and suddenly you’re in someone else’s story. One guy hit on me twice—once inside the store and then again outside, like he was really going for it.

Finally he asked, “You got a man?”

And I said to him, “Yeah—he’s really great.”

Which wasn’t true.
But it was easier than explaining anything real.

And it all kind of sits next to each other—the adrenaline, the stories, the choices, the little moments where you decide what to say and who to be.

Sometimes it’s about surviving something big.
Sometimes it’s about choosing a future.
And sometimes it’s just standing in a gas station, answering a question in a way that lets you move on.