There are some professions in this world that just lend themselves to hearing other people’s secrets, and while we assume bartenders and doctors are going to hear more than their fair share of juicy details, we think less about cab drivers.
I think that in the age of cell phones, they might even be more likely to hear stuff that’s none of their business – and these are ready to dish.
1. I feel like this is definitely a thing.
My taxi driver buddy called it The Limo Syndrome – people talking loudly to each other about a business deal to impress the driver.
2. Good thing he wasn’t a cop in the daytime.
A ride share driver here. I once had a young lady in the car on her phone with her boyfriend.
The only thing they talked about was how many drug he sold that night and that he had too much “E” and had to push the E
3. A bad day.
There was a lady I picked up at like 4am and she was obviously desperately seeking something. The trip was over an hour and a half away and I could tell she was hurting physically. Sniffles and cringing that were synonymous with opioid withdrawals. She was quiet the first 45 min but texting often.
A phone call occurred where she was arguing with someone who didn’t want her to go to this destination. She kept saying she would be fine. I asked out of concern if she was ok and she spilled the beans. The call was from her girlfriend who didn’t want her to go to this house in a fancy area to meet up with some dudes who wanted her to come over to hang out in exchange for pills. Her gf was convinced she was going to be raped.
I told her that I’d been in a similar situation with pills when I was younger and that cannabis helped and that in a few more days she would be free of the whole thing. She cried and cried. I had an old cannabis vape deep in my car that I donated to the cause. It worked and she chilled out and let her know if she cancelled I would return her to her pickup location since I had to go back to that area anyway. She cancelled the trip. She slept the whole way back.
I hope she made it out of that addiction. <3 those places really feel hopeless when you don’t know how to get out.
4. Oh my god.
A woman who was pregnant with twins and also a heroin addict. she always got a ride to what I assume was her dealers house.
She offered me one if her unborn baby’s but I could only have 1 because she already traded one for drugs.
People unload on cab drivers all the time but this one stuck with me.
5. Easy money.
Order, destination address — “by city”, submission-location by navigator. A girl drove up, sat down, said, there is no need to go anywhere, we need to charge the phone; we sat for 15 minutes, talked, recharged the phone, looked at the charging percentage, said:
“Well, that’s enough,” gave 50$ and left…
6. It’s like a true crime episode.
I gave a ride to two women who spent the whole ride debating whether or not the man whose house I had just picked them up from had killed their friend who had died in his kitchen earlier that same day.
The alleged victim was a woman in her early 40s who lived with the man and had, according to his report, dropped dead quite unexpectedly after an afternoon of yard work and bike-riding.
Her best friends weren’t having it.
7. You never know who’s driving.
I got in a taxi around 15 years ago with my best mate and we were so drunk. We were having a laugh with the driver and told him like so many secrets. Who we were dating, mischief we’d got upto in clubs, stuff we did at work, well you get the drill! Nothing bad, just silly 18 year old.
The driver was so chatty and kept encouraging us. When we went to pay and get out, be was like “do you know so and so?” Eh yeah we did. We worked with this women, and it turned out it was his sister.
He told her everything! We were mortified and I never told a taxi driver another secret again.
8. Living a nightmare.
I worked for a rental car agency and would pick customers up or drop them off from home to shop. Anyways, one lady had just had her son murdered the day before. She lived in a rougher part of town and I think it was a gang shooting if I remember correctly.
The victim was a student not a banger. The poor lady was just trying to keep it together and get through her daily obligations.
9. Blackmail if she’s a loud neighbor.
Used to drive for Uber. Would chill at my condo, wait for a ride to ding, pick up. One ding I got was really close. A pick up scheduled from my own complex. I pop down, turn on the car, pull it out.
My neighbor walks down – girl in her 20s. She’s with her friend, and spent a significant portion of the ride talking about how she’s cheating on her boyfriend.
10. Unexpected for sure.
Former Uber driver… Picked up a very well -dressed lady from one side of town heading to a very rich neighborhood on the other side of town.
During the ride, she made a series of calls and it became clear she was a call girl with quite a few customers. It also became clear I was delivering her to her biggest client, an accident and injury attorney known for extremely extensive advertising in my local area.
Anybody around here would know his name. And he was supposed to be married and the whole family man type.
Ah. Well. My passenger indicated otherwise.
His house was a very nice mansion. Law must pay well.
11. Trauma sharing.
Uber driver but, a few discussions about terminal illness (their own or a friend or relative’s).
Two different women had been sexually assaulted prior to getting in, and had quite emotional discussions about it.
A couple of ‘musings on life’ conversations that kinda twigged my suicide detecting spidey senses. But who knows?
Also one passanger mused on an abusive upbringing. We went on a somewhat disappointing date after actually.
12. My heart.
There was an old Vietnamese man that goes into my car and he told me about his life. He told how he got drafted into the Vietcong just as the war ended so he didn’t see any combat.
He told me sometimes in life you get lucky and other times you don’t.
I dropped him off at a cancer center.
13. Oops.
My friend got in Uber one day and the driver was talking about selling weed on the phone. When he hung up, my friend asked about prices, got his number and bought some weed from him.
A few days later, he got the exact same driver, who obviously didn’t remember him because he did the whole spiel again. My friend was like “Dude, we just did this a few days ago. I bought some weed from you.”
14. There’s a lot to unpack here.
When a girl told me she taunted her gay longtime friend to try out having straight sex with her just to find out the difference as she herself is bisexual. The guy finally gave in and liked it. They did so one more time and that’s it.
Sad part is that she just found out the guy is now going out with her best friend and is now swearing to be straight. She regrets having converted him to straight and now doesn’t know whether she’s jealous of them or truly in love with him.
Asked for my advice on how to break them up without being judged.
15. What was the rating for that?
Flip side of the coin, Uber driver once told me and my SO that she had been the victim of Satanic ritual abuse as a child.
She was nice enough but clearly a little unbalanced and either looking for attention or a legitimate product of all Satanic Panic nonsense back in the day.
16. He’ll never forget it.
Used to uber on the side, here in Ottawa. Honestly, one could surveil both business and government here while driving an Uber if they wanted to. You could run 3 drivers and get intelligence about just a ton of things happening night and day.
I definitely heard a ton of things, but the one that got me was about businesses closing and firing every one of its 200 employees months before it happened. It sucked for me when that one hit the news. I was there when they made the decision.
Sweet things happened too. A woman had a fun dinner with her best friend and got in the passenger side first and said to me “watch this, I just found out I’m pregnant today, going home to tell my husband, but she’s going to me the first to know.” “After me. . . .?” “Oh my god! That’s right, you’re the first I’ve told. I’m totally freaking out right now.” “It’s cool. No big deal.”
Anyway, 5 min later they’re joking about it with me and she asks me my name. I tell her and she’s like “It was between that and Andrew for the middle name. This is a sign! It has to me (my name)!” “What if it’s a girl?” “She’ll be a badass with a male middle name like Michael Burnham.”
Coolest, sweetest conversation of my life.
17. Sometimes you just don’t want to know.
I work uber black in Los Angeles, picked up a customer round midnight from a flight from Mexico to lax,, had 2 stops, 1st stop he waited for some “compadres” who loaded 5 duffel bags in my suv, 2nd stop was from L.A To San Jose! 6hr drive!
After $2500 fare and $400 tip, I never dared asked what was in those bags!
18. Oh my god.
Uber driver. I pick a dude up from a strip club, a well known local celebrity. His drop off is an affluent neighborhood in the foothills.
As I pull into the driveway a half naked middle aged woman in lingerie is standing by the garage. He says ‘this is close enough’ so I stop about 20 yards from the woman.
She cracks a whip and points to the ground at her feet. This dude gets out and on hands and knees in his Armani suit starts crawling toward her.
She cracks the whip again and points at me, ‘you’re next’.
19. That’s interesting.
When my dad was driving a taxi in the 80s he said he picked up Meatloaf with a giant stuffed alligator at a bar.
While stopped at a light Meatloaf offered him cocaine from a hidden pouch in the alligator that was also stuffed with more cocaine and cash.
20. This is unbelievable.
My uncle was a cab driver in LA. One day he picks up 2 guys who then discuss a murder they are going to commit. After a while they begin discussing whether they should also kill the cab driver because he heard them talking about the plan and could identify them.
They eventually decided not to, but that was the day my uncle decided to stop being a cab driver.
21. Bless his heart.
An 18 year old lad, regular customer, was stressing over his exam results and told me seriously if he’d failed that his life was over and he would commit suicide. He was completely serious, apparently his parents had been putting string pressure on him.
I brought him home and called his father out of the house, by this time the poor lad was in tears. I said to him that he should tell his dad what he’d told me, by this time the father was distraught. I let them both talk for a bit right there and then the father got him out of the car and brought him inside.
The update was that he told his parents the whole story, they were horrified and got him into therapy. I’ve no idea whether he passed the exams or not but I do know he was all right afterwards.
I was very shook up about it. The situation could do easily have gone wrong and I take no credit at all.
22. Quite the reveal(s).
That he was cheating on his wife with his cocaine dealer, who came from the same country as I did (which is how the conversation got started) and it had been going on for 25 years.
I dont know what impresses me more, a 25 year affair or a 25 year cocaine habit.
To clarify since a lot of you are speculating, the dealer was a woman. Quite good in bed too, from his detailed description. It was my first fare of the night, the first time working there as a “cab driver”. I was helping out a friend of my dad’s who owned a bar deep in Ontario, CA by driving his regulars home.
Fun times, lot of fights, incredible amounts of shenanigans between the patrons, and incredibly loud corridos blasting from the speakers all throughout the night.
23. True regrets.
I’ve worked for Uber and once a passenger, a clearly intoxicated lady, told me she should have married her brother-in-law, cause her husband had a tiny dick and was much less handsome, but because the husband was also far richer, she married him.
I hope she doesn’t remember she told me that, she’s probably mortified to this day if she does.
24. A horrible smell.
I worked incident support for a Kinda Shouldn’t Name Ride Company that rhymes with Shoober. It tended to be either rider complaining a driver did X to them or a driver complaining a rider threw up in their car etc.
This one dude called incident support to tell us that following picking up a fare – a dude with two huge duffel bags in the boot – his car was written off and therefore couldn’t work with aforementioned car.
Turned out the dude had gotten a ride at 2am, put the duffel bags in the trunk, told the driver he’d done something he really regretted but couldn’t go back on, took the ride to an underpass with a river and threw the duffel bags into the river.
Driver called the police first, mostly to tell them a dude was being weird as hell. After a brief search of the river for the bags the police found riders murdered cut up girlfriend in the bags.
The smell was so bad in the car that the cleaning crew couldn’t remove the smell or stains after the police forensics exam. The insurance company wrote off the car.
25. Kindly kidnapped.
Two medical professionals, one of them talked to his colleague about when he was “kindly kidnapped” out of the hospital.
Two guys that took him to a mansion outside the city and asked to examine the heart condition of a man who seemed to be a local mafia boss that was wanted from the law.
They somehow provided him with all the tools and help and made him operate the boss. They finally let him go and paid him with a big sum of cash saying they would contact him again for anything else.
He said it was of the scariest yet most interesting experiences in his life.
26. People, man.
How a guy gambled away his house payment for the month and didnt know how to tell his wife.
a pregnant girl going to a side pieces house for the night saying it might be the last time for a while
27. Extended warranties?
Two guys talking freely about their scam op and going into the specifics of how to get the most out of it.
The scam has something to do with cars and I can’t remember what it was I just remember them saying that it got them around $20mil
28. Hate that for him.
I used to drive for Uber for about a year. Never had any crazy secrets. The craziest ride I had was after this kid who in his late teens and needed a ride on Thanksgiving evening after he got beat up by his dad and brother.
His dad came out of the house and stood in front of the car. I backed out of there with the kid and took him an hour, hour and a half away from there to his gf’s house. I felt bad for the kid, apparently he was trying to reconnect with his estranged family and it apparently didn’t work out.
I’m just glad I could get him to a safe place.
29. That’s really something.
A 50 year old man admitted to me that he doesn’t know how to cook and doesn’t have the time to do it, so he’ll sneak out late at night to get leftovers from his mother’s house.
30. I’d say he earned it.
Driving a fare to th airport. Hit a large piece of black ice. Cab skidded hit a guardrail. Careened off another car that had flipped. White knuckled the shit out of it. Skidded safetly into the berm. Called my buddy to come get me. Took the fare to the airport.
While we were going to the airport. They fare asked me “why was driving a cab?” I told him I was saving up for a car. I was 22 and broke. Handed me his card and told me to call him tomorrow. I did.
Fare was fleet manager for Hertz. Sold me a used rental car for peanuts. Side note. My son drives it, while at college. Thank you Mr. Vance.
31. That sounds amazing.
My best ride was Michael Fassbender (actor) Lax to BH, he treat in n out burger and we karaoke all the way to hotel (he said his dream as a teen was to be a rock star) coolest guy ever!
32. Amazing.
Once drove three teenage girls. At the end of the trip I knew everything about their friends’ sexual life. Who had slept with who, with or without condom. Who had infected who with chlamydia.
And so on ad nauseam.
I can’t believe the things people share with strangers.
If you’re someone who hears random secrets, pass them along in the comments!
