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"when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs" Parent comment doesn't say the drivers said "love" and the comments

by larrys 12y ago

"when people tell you they love their jobs while you are paying them to perform their jobs" Parent comment doesn't say the drivers said "love" and the comments made don't appear to be over the top in any way. Also you are discounting the parent commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting emotion. (Not saying you aren't right to be skeptical as you raised a valid point).

smacktoward 12y ago
The point is that taxi driving is a service industry, and nobody makes money in a service job by appearing unhappy or bitter. Customers come back more often and tip better if you seem cheerful, not if you confront them as cogs in a system that's screwing you. We want our baristas to be Manic Pixie Dream Girls, not overworked, underpaid people who resent our taking 15 minutes to decide what flavor syrup we want in our latte. The result is what David Foster Wallace, in his classic essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_Never_Do_Again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_N...), called the "professional smile": This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry... at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, and on and on. You know this smile-the one that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee... Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile? And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who's ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker's scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile.
- stormbrew 12y ago
  While it's valid to question what an Uber driver says to a customer, it doesn't necessarily follow that because some Uber drivers have come out against it publicly that all of them are somehow in thrall to the company and hiding their disgust, or even that their issues are actually worse than the issues you might hear a taxi driver say about their company off the meter. Particularly since taxi companies are almost always local and local rules vary. To go back to a specific point in the OP, if an Uber driver says that when they were a taxi driver the company's cut was 40% instead of the 20% uber takes, I'd be inclined to think they're not lying about it. Merely not bringing it up would be more than sufficient to maintain the illusion. And to compare this to a personal experience conversing with a cab driver and an uber driver, I had a cabbie tell me that they wait a month to get money from debit or credit transactions in their cab from the company, and this is one of the reasons they resist customers paying that way. An uber driver told me it's a week for them. That's a huge difference in payment cycle. Also, if Uber drivers are trapped somehow from taking their labour elsewhere, it is entirely because of the regulatory capture created by the taxi industry's relationship with city administrations that imposes inflexible limits on the way the taxi industry can grow (often to the point of it being essentially a planned economy).
cjbprime 12y ago
> Also you are discounting the parent commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting emotion. The parent commenter shouldn't feel insulted; I don't trust anyone's ability to perform that task reliably. That's why the entire field of sociological research exists, and is conducted with far more rigour than asking people things and attempting to interpret the answers they give while they are under coercion.

by larrys 12y ago

smacktoward 12y ago

The point is that taxi driving is a service industry, and nobody makes money in a service job by appearing unhappy or bitter. Customers come back more often and tip better if you seem cheerful, not if you confront them as cogs in a system that's screwing you. We want our baristas to be Manic Pixie Dream Girls, not overworked, underpaid people who resent our taking 15 minutes to decide what flavor syrup we want in our latte. The result is what David Foster Wallace, in his classic essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_Never_Do_Again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supposedly_Fun_Thing_I%27ll_N...), called the "professional smile": This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry... at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, and on and on. You know this smile-the one that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee... Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile? And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who's ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker's scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile.

stormbrew 12y ago
While it's valid to question what an Uber driver says to a customer, it doesn't necessarily follow that because some Uber drivers have come out against it publicly that all of them are somehow in thrall to the company and hiding their disgust, or even that their issues are actually worse than the issues you might hear a taxi driver say about their company off the meter. Particularly since taxi companies are almost always local and local rules vary. To go back to a specific point in the OP, if an Uber driver says that when they were a taxi driver the company's cut was 40% instead of the 20% uber takes, I'd be inclined to think they're not lying about it. Merely not bringing it up would be more than sufficient to maintain the illusion. And to compare this to a personal experience conversing with a cab driver and an uber driver, I had a cabbie tell me that they wait a month to get money from debit or credit transactions in their cab from the company, and this is one of the reasons they resist customers paying that way. An uber driver told me it's a week for them. That's a huge difference in payment cycle. Also, if Uber drivers are trapped somehow from taking their labour elsewhere, it is entirely because of the regulatory capture created by the taxi industry's relationship with city administrations that imposes inflexible limits on the way the taxi industry can grow (often to the point of it being essentially a planned economy).

cjbprime 12y ago

> Also you are discounting the parent commenters ability to discern a BS answer from a real answer by interpreting emotion. The parent commenter shouldn't feel insulted; I don't trust anyone's ability to perform that task reliably. That's why the entire field of sociological research exists, and is conducted with far more rigour than asking people things and attempting to interpret the answers they give while they are under coercion.