“If you can’t handle me at my worst, you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best,” Marilyn Monroe may have said. But then she lived in the world before Uber.
In the so-called sharing economy, we’re all reduced to a star rating or a decimal point. Conscious of being under assessment — and the risk of our privileges being revoked — we are our best, most considerate selves when in the passenger seat of an Uber or packing up at the end of an Airbnb stay.
As the adage goes: treat others’ Toyota Corollas or spare bedrooms as you would like yours to be treated.
The system holds people accountable for their actions, rewarding those with positive reviews and encouraging those who don’t to buck up their acts or get booted off. Now Uber has made it possible to find out easily where you fall on that spectrum — the question is, do you want to know?
At the end of March, Uber introduced a feature that allowed users to find out their average rating through the app, one of several changes brought in to improve their customer support services. “Ultimately, our goal is to create a product that’s so great you never need to contact customer service,” the press release explained.
It didn’t say whether shaming users with bad ratings into stepping up their game was part of the strategy. Until this update, the only way to find out had been to ask your driver. The embarrassment of being seen to care — or the fear of what you might be told — meant few people did so.
If my example is anything to go by, they were happier for it.
I have a bad rating — the worst of anyone I know. The discovery filled me first with disbelief, then with shame, and then into an aggressive public relations campaign that leaves me sapped of energy and interest in others before I even get to a party.
I check my rating the morning after every ride, and I’m starting to see the fruits of my effort, with it creeping up by about 0.01 each time.
But I’m still some way off reaching a rating I’m not ashamed of — and I’ll never again be able to catch an Uber without being keenly, excruciatingly attuned to whether the driver wants me to talk more, or less, when all I really want to do is scroll through Instagram in silence, as I did before I was burdened with this knowledge.
It’s just so easy to find out. Make sure the app is up to date, go to Help, Account, then “I’d like to know my rating”. The lengthy preamble that appears is the first indication that what you are about to learn may change your Uber experience for the worse.
“The rating system works to make sure that the most respectful riders and drivers are using Uber. Ratings are always reported as averages, and neither riders nor drivers will see the individual rating left for a particular trip.”
Remember, like eavesdropping on a conversation or searching for your own name in someone else’s Facebook messages or texts, this is not information you can unlearn.
If your rating is less than 5.0 — and it probably will be — you will obsess over which driver might have brought down your average, why it was unfair of them to do so and to whom you can possibly pass off the blame. (An Uber spokesman declined to give an overall average for all users “due to privacy”.)
Did you talk too much — or too little? Were you not suitably grateful for the bottle of lukewarm water? Was it the time you spilt a kebab in the backseat? Was it your friend’s fault for talking about their sexual history in a tone and at a volume that was undeniably, with hindsight, distasteful?
If you try to process this information by sharing it with others, it gives them a metric by which to feel they are better than you, and a one-size-fits-all retort to when you are being seen as a bad sport: “This is why you have a bad Uber rating.”
But if you’re sure you want to know, I can’t stop you. Just don’t complain to me when it’s less than 5.0. And if it isn’t, I don’t want to hear about it.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2016
