Last updated on January 20th, 2017 at 06:50 am
Usually my “on demand” car service of choice is Uber, but lately they have been grinding my gears.
It seems like every time I call up the app, they arbitrarily assign surge pricing to the fare. Yes, I would like a ride. No, I would not like to pay 1.5x the going rate.
The first time this happened on Oahu, I called up Lyft for an alternative. Uber immediately gave a push notification that Surge Pricing had ended once Lyft was pulled up (do you think they were listening?), and we got home safely.
The second time this happened on Oahu, I called up Lyft to request a ride and was connected with Arkom, who was highly rated. More importantly, his car seemed large enough to fit our cache of baggage.
Arkom pulls up to the Hyatt Place parking area and greets us in one of the coolest ways possible. By playing us a song on his Ukelele. Mrs. Jeffsetter managed to record the audio of his song, and it’s still awesome today. Here is the song:
He also told us that he was voted the best Lyft driver ever, and we couldn’t disagree. This guy was awesome.
As we drove to the airport, Arkom asked our story and shared his. He has been on Oahu for 20+ years from Chicago and teaches music. Normally he doesn’t have the Ukelele in the car, but we happened to catch him on a good day. The back-stories of the people we meet in these ride services are always so interesting.
We shared our story – about how nearly everything we owned was in his car at that moment, and we were going to keep on moving until the money ran out or we got tired of travel. He asked if he could follow along with our travels. I gave him my trusty Jeffsetter “business card” and he said that he would be following along with our travels.
I told Arkom that we would be posting about our awesome experience riding with him. It took a week, but here we are.
Thanks again for the ride my friend!
I know that car services are on-demand, so I am not sure how you would request Arkom for yourself, but if you are ever on Oahu, you should look him up. You might get lucky and have an awesome driver and your own song!
That’s awesome!!