Lyfting to the Con

We decided to forgo traffic and parking hassles at the Oregon Convention Center during the Rose City Comic Con. Instead, we took Lyft, and met these delightful drivers:

Rebecca was a very pale young white woman with light red hair, who told us about the wedding she'd been in earlier in the week, and the fact that she is going to be in her sister's wedding next March. There can be such an issue with bridesmaids' dresses when the women are different sizes! She also told us about the bonuses she was hoping to earn from Lyft based on the number of rides she was expecting to get over the weekend. She wants to make a lot of money, because she's hoping to start a three-month EMT training program in October. She had wanted to be a firefighter, but has asthma, so that wasn't going to work out. She already carries a first aid kit she has customized--for example, she carries many pairs of gloves in case someone wants to help her at an emergency scene but they don't have their own gloves. Just last Sunday she had helped at a freeway scene. A 17-year-old guy had hydroplaned during the heavy rain, hit the middle guardrail, and flipped his car. Although his face was covered with blood, it turned out to be just a bloody nose (not even broken!), but he was in shock, didn’t want to call his mom (it was a new car), didn’t want an ambulance. She got on the phone with his mom and got his mom to convince him to accept the ambulance.

Tiare was a dark-haired white woman with dark-rimmed glasses. She was playing very New Agey music that almost put me to sleep. She loved the new Dark Crystal series so much that it made her cry. She is going to be getting back into the music show production business; she is going to be putting on a cabaret at a local venue. Before she picked us up, she'd had a meeting with the guy who is building the cabaret set and it is all going really well. She has not yet seen Carnival Row but loves that kind of art. She has also not yet see the movie Coco and wasn't sure she wants to because it's animated--she lived in Mexico City for a while and was afraid the movie doesn't show enough respect to the Mexican culture. But between us gushing over it and the fact that it took Pixar seven years to make it (so that they could get it right), we think we convinced her to see it.

Jason was a middle-aged white guy who wore a gray baseball cap. He recognized "Jon" as a repeat passenger, most recently taking Jon to his GCP Professional Data Engineer cert exam at PSU. Luckily, Jon passed that test. Jason had enjoyed his trip up to Seattle to see a Mariners game, and was excited to be going to a Trail Blazers game soon. Jason had taken a day or two off during the week, so was planning to work 14-hour days all weekend to make up for any lost income. On the day he was driving us, he expected to hit his 7,800th ride, and expected to hit his 8,000th by the end of the next week at the latest.

Ammar was a young Middle Eastern guy with a dashing mustache. He was very excited to learn that the Comic Con was on, and was thinking of taking his girlfriend to it the next day. He's been a big manga fan all his life, with old favorites like Gundam and Ghost in the Shell. He kept asking, "Who did you see?" He didn't mean which celebrities; he meant which costumed characters. We told him we'd seen Spider-Man, Doctor Who, Bat Man, Groot, many flavors of Star Wars, a bit of Star Trek, lots of Hobbits. He ooh'd and aah'd through our list. We'd seen many manga characters, too, but we don't know their names. He made a sad noise at that. As for his Lyft career, he works only about four hours a day, and it will be ending soon when he heads back to school. He's a Chem.E major at Oregon State and needs to head back to Corvallis in about a week.

Elaine was a 60-year old white woman with long gray-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She lives in Castle Rock, WA, which is about an hour north of Portland. She gets up at about 3:00 am, and when she gets to Vancouver, WA at around 4:00 am, she turns on her Lyft app to start getting rides throughout the Portland metro area (and somewhere in her morning, she drops off one of her five grandchildren at high school). She was born and raised in Portland, but when her husband died, and with all the changes to Portland in recent years, she fled to the country life. But she still drives down just about every day to do an eight-hour shift, minimum.

Kareem was a young black guy who had classical music blaring from his radio. He used to go to comic cons--he is from Atlanta, so used to attend Dragon Con, a heavy weight of the annual Con schedule--but he feels they are now run by people who don't actually care about what's being created; they are just trying to cash in. He was late getting started on the day he drove us, because he had been watching the Cowboys-Redskins (31-21) and the Patriots-Dolphins (43-0!) games. He's been learning to program and will probably be joining a coding academy soon--he's leaning toward Epicodus, for their program and their job-placement services.

That's it! The weekend is a wrap 🎉