I force myself to get inside my car and start my app. There are no people who want a ride next to my house right now. I may be waiting for some time before I ge

I force myself to get inside my car and start my app. There are no people who want a ride next to my house right now. I may be waiting for some time before I get a request that takes me to San Jose or another populated center. Or at least next to a hotel or something. I drive around, worrying that I don't get dragged into Los Altos (nobody wants rides OUT of Los Altos late at night - they're all coming home). Sometimes I will drive for a few minutes picking someone up before they cancel. If I didn't get far enough to pick them up I get no money for this. I finally pick up the person and try to make conversation with them. They're not always willing to talk, but I understand. After driving for a while it gets too late to get too many requests. I start late because driving in traffic is a horrible hourly rate. I had to deal with app crashes, the maps app being wrong due to changes, people putting the wrong address, people not finding my car and calling me in a noisy place etc. Some people don't like this because they think I'm a full time driver and I'm supposed to know how to deal with these situations. I'm not a professional. I never received any training by Uber. I don't know every single street in your neighborhood. I don't even have enough experience doing it to know how to deal with every situation. So I would use the odometer to see how much I actually drove (Uber doesn't count picking up as distance - a hold-over from taxi companies). I calculate my profit using the amount of miles, and minutes (I time when I start, not when I make my first pick-up). When I see a single digit number it makes me disappointed yet again. Even when I'm driving at football games it's still more like $12 an hour because of the damn traffic. It's 3x more expensive, but it takes very long to get out of the parking lot and to get into it. Don't even let me get started on star ratings... giving an Uber driver 4 stars basically says "this person shouldn't be driving with Uber" since the minimum rating is like 4.3