5 ms·

I had a really bad date about a month ago. In a part of Brooklyn I'm not familiar with. Things started well, and the woman asked me if I would help her move som

I had a really bad date about a month ago. In a part of Brooklyn I'm not familiar with. Things started well, and the woman asked me if I would help her move some stuff because she was having some remodeling done. I was all, "Okay. Sure." I wasn't set up all that well to begin with. Long day at work, tired. My phone was close to dead. So euphemism for hooking up or not, I went home with her. And she's legit trying to move stuff. So I start helping out. She has a lot of art, and she's telling me really specifically about where to put stuff. I take one painting and put it where I thought she wanted it. That was not where she wanted it. Because the way I placed it in the closet it was touching some of her clothes. This was not okay. And she flips the fuck out on me and starts screaming at me about how I don't care about her things. Okay, okay. I'm sorry. We're cool now, right honey bunny? We're cool. She's cool. So then we're trying to move her biggest piece out of the living room. It's an 8'x15'-ish mural. Large. Heavy. We get it off the wall hooks holding it up, and she straight up drops her end of it, causing the corner of the thing I was holding over my head to crash down on my face. The corner landed straight on my left eye and cut me on the eyebrow before sinking into the eye itself. And then she starts screaming again about how this is what I deserve for disrespecting her art. At this point, I'm out. I just left. I left my man purse and everything. Did not care. Just wanted out. Because this woman is crazy. I had about 5% on my phone at that point, and I tried to get an uber to take me home. Got a connection to a driver, and my phone died. About this time, I started feeling really sketchy. Like something was wrong. Not wrong in a "I've had too much to drink." but more like, "There are probably drugs involved here." And I don't do drugs. Uber driver never showed up. I woke up in my apartment about 8 hours later. Have no idea how I got there. Judging from the way my legs felt, I suspect I walked the whole way home from Williamsburg to Ditmas Park. My entire face was caked in blood, and I had to get 6 stitches put in my left eyebrow and a badly blackened eye. Also ruined my favorite sweater and jeans. I mean, it was a date. I was dressed up nice. Bonus points to Uber for charging me the cancellation fee. I get it, they are not an ambulance service or a medical team. But come on, you have to have a better solution to a user whose phone dies than, "fuck you. give me five bucks."

pmalynin 10y ago
This one of the most interesting stories I've read in a while
avar 10y ago
How could they have cancellation fees at all if you could just turn off your phone and claim it died to evade them?
- ianamartin 10y ago
  The Uber app already requests a lot of access to your phone as it is. Shouldn't be a problem for the app to get info about the state of your phone re: battery power. There are iOS APIs that can tell you this. I don't know Android well enough to say, but my instinct is that every mobile device capable of running the Uber app has a low power mode. The app should be able to query the state of the phone to determine whether or not the user is likely to lose power before the pickup occurs. But of course, doing that would require that the Uber app was honest about when the driver is actually going to get to the rider. There are solutions to this problem. I don't know what all of them are, but I guarantee you that they exist. It's not that hard of a problem. And we also don't know how much of a problem that cancellations are in reality. And we don't know how much of this hypothetical problem is actually caused by drivers fucking with things. So, I dunno, I think your question involves a lot of assumptions that aren't really correct. Like, not even remotely. You're pretending there's a legit problem, where we have no evidence of one.
  - avar 10y ago
    > I don't know Android well enough to say. You can easily fake the battery status on Android: https://stanfy.com/blog/android-shell-part-1-mocking-battery-status/ https://stanfy.com/blog/android-shell-part-1-mocking-battery... > It's not that hard of a problem. You and the grandparent are proposing that Uber somehow use information provided by the user's phone to waive the cancellation fee, when the user is in control of their phone and has every economic incentive to game the system. Even if you could get this to work it's not at all obvious that it's desirable. Right now the system is simple, you order a car and for some reason the app turns off, you get charged a cancellation fee. That's a hard problem to solve. What if you have one Uber and two customers who'd like to order it, one with 3% battery and one with 97%? Should the risk of sending the car to the user with 3% battery purely be assumed by Uber?
dmitripopov 10y ago
Well, this is what "Sex in the City" is about in real life :)
- ianamartin 10y ago
  I carry a pair of Manolo's in my work bag just in case I ever run into Sarah Jessica Parker. Which really sucked last week when I was taking a brisket to work that I smoked when I was visiting my family in Texas. The BBQ sauce spilled, and man, Manolo's and BBQ sauce are not as sexy in the city as you would think. I literally ruined a 1,200 dollar pair of shoes. My team claims the brisket was worth it.
rajathagasthya 10y ago
You have good writing skills. Your story, though shocking, had me gripped :) Did you ever find out why you felt sketchy and why you don't remember how you got home? Was that because of the injury? As far as Uber charging cancellation fee, I don't think they have a way to know if your phone died. For them, it's equivalent to the driver being unable to contact you.
- ianamartin 10y ago
  Thank you for the compliment. I try to write as well as I can. I did talk to the woman later to get my man purse back. She straight up ruffied me. I have no idea for what purpose. As for Uber seeing stuff, I have some posts below on the topic. I think this is not a difficult problem to solve. Actually, what it really boils down to is CAP theorem. Uber is just making the wrong choices about CAP. In this case we aren't talking about a networked system in the normal way we do with distributed database systems. We're talking about a network of people. How do you handle it when there's a partition event? Uber's default choice is fuck it. Write one part of the transaction to the database and charge the user a disconnect fee. That's not in anyway the correct way to handle a network partition. That's like if you have an application that receives a message and logs it, but can't get a response to my callback, and it just says, "Okay. My work here is done." And then makes a new entry in a table that says the failed callback owes 5 bucks. That's absolutely stupid and wrong. Network partitions are going to happen. All the damn time. And if your best mechanism for dealing with them is blame the callback . . . you have some serious thinking to do. Because that shit is broken.
  - sulam 10y ago
    Ignoring the rest of your story, which is interesting and weird, I think your analogy to CAP breaks down fast. The driver cannot roll back their time spent. You called them to a spot, presumably they went there and you weren't there. They are out their time, it's gone. Any number of bad things could have happened to you, but the user agreement is that if you don't show, you pay.
    - wastedhours 10y ago
scottlamb 10y ago
Please report this woman to the police. Drugging you is a crime. We'll never know for sure what she planned to do to you, but I doubt it was just furniture moving. And this probably wasn't her first or last time. You might be able to stop her.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  It could also have been a head injury. Hard to say from the description.
  - scottlamb 10y ago
    From another comment of his: "I did talk to the woman later to get my man purse back. She straight up ruffied me. I have no idea for what purpose."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dang 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020225. Tangents are fine when they aren't generic (e.g. getting stuck in some kind of boilerplate argument) but this one took on a life of its own.

pmalynin 10y ago

This one of the most interesting stories I've read in a while

avar 10y ago

How could they have cancellation fees at all if you could just turn off your phone and claim it died to evade them?

ianamartin 10y ago
The Uber app already requests a lot of access to your phone as it is. Shouldn't be a problem for the app to get info about the state of your phone re: battery power. There are iOS APIs that can tell you this. I don't know Android well enough to say, but my instinct is that every mobile device capable of running the Uber app has a low power mode. The app should be able to query the state of the phone to determine whether or not the user is likely to lose power before the pickup occurs. But of course, doing that would require that the Uber app was honest about when the driver is actually going to get to the rider. There are solutions to this problem. I don't know what all of them are, but I guarantee you that they exist. It's not that hard of a problem. And we also don't know how much of a problem that cancellations are in reality. And we don't know how much of this hypothetical problem is actually caused by drivers fucking with things. So, I dunno, I think your question involves a lot of assumptions that aren't really correct. Like, not even remotely. You're pretending there's a legit problem, where we have no evidence of one.
- avar 10y ago
  > I don't know Android well enough to say. You can easily fake the battery status on Android: https://stanfy.com/blog/android-shell-part-1-mocking-battery-status/ https://stanfy.com/blog/android-shell-part-1-mocking-battery... > It's not that hard of a problem. You and the grandparent are proposing that Uber somehow use information provided by the user's phone to waive the cancellation fee, when the user is in control of their phone and has every economic incentive to game the system. Even if you could get this to work it's not at all obvious that it's desirable. Right now the system is simple, you order a car and for some reason the app turns off, you get charged a cancellation fee. That's a hard problem to solve. What if you have one Uber and two customers who'd like to order it, one with 3% battery and one with 97%? Should the risk of sending the car to the user with 3% battery purely be assumed by Uber?

dmitripopov 10y ago

Well, this is what "Sex in the City" is about in real life :)

ianamartin 10y ago
I carry a pair of Manolo's in my work bag just in case I ever run into Sarah Jessica Parker. Which really sucked last week when I was taking a brisket to work that I smoked when I was visiting my family in Texas. The BBQ sauce spilled, and man, Manolo's and BBQ sauce are not as sexy in the city as you would think. I literally ruined a 1,200 dollar pair of shoes. My team claims the brisket was worth it.

rajathagasthya 10y ago

You have good writing skills. Your story, though shocking, had me gripped :) Did you ever find out why you felt sketchy and why you don't remember how you got home? Was that because of the injury? As far as Uber charging cancellation fee, I don't think they have a way to know if your phone died. For them, it's equivalent to the driver being unable to contact you.

ianamartin 10y ago
Thank you for the compliment. I try to write as well as I can. I did talk to the woman later to get my man purse back. She straight up ruffied me. I have no idea for what purpose. As for Uber seeing stuff, I have some posts below on the topic. I think this is not a difficult problem to solve. Actually, what it really boils down to is CAP theorem. Uber is just making the wrong choices about CAP. In this case we aren't talking about a networked system in the normal way we do with distributed database systems. We're talking about a network of people. How do you handle it when there's a partition event? Uber's default choice is fuck it. Write one part of the transaction to the database and charge the user a disconnect fee. That's not in anyway the correct way to handle a network partition. That's like if you have an application that receives a message and logs it, but can't get a response to my callback, and it just says, "Okay. My work here is done." And then makes a new entry in a table that says the failed callback owes 5 bucks. That's absolutely stupid and wrong. Network partitions are going to happen. All the damn time. And if your best mechanism for dealing with them is blame the callback . . . you have some serious thinking to do. Because that shit is broken.
- sulam 10y ago
  Ignoring the rest of your story, which is interesting and weird, I think your analogy to CAP breaks down fast. The driver cannot roll back their time spent. You called them to a spot, presumably they went there and you weren't there. They are out their time, it's gone. Any number of bad things could have happened to you, but the user agreement is that if you don't show, you pay.
  - wastedhours 10y ago

scottlamb 10y ago

Please report this woman to the police. Drugging you is a crime. We'll never know for sure what she planned to do to you, but I doubt it was just furniture moving. And this probably wasn't her first or last time. You might be able to stop her.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
It could also have been a head injury. Hard to say from the description.
- scottlamb 10y ago
  From another comment of his: "I did talk to the woman later to get my man purse back. She straight up ruffied me. I have no idea for what purpose."

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dang 10y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020225. Tangents are fine when they aren't generic (e.g. getting stuck in some kind of boilerplate argument) but this one took on a life of its own.