“I used to live in Las Vegas and drive for Uber there. One evening, I picked up a passenger at the Caesar’s Palace who had a really large bag with him. I put it in the trunk, and he proceeded to tell me that he’s going to his house in the suburbs. It was about 2:30 am and a 30-minute drive.
We were almost to his house having a casual conversation when he asked me, ‘Hey, do you mind if we go by the store really quick? I need to pick up some milk.’ I told him, ‘Sure, no problem.’ The guy thanked me and headed inside a grocery store.
It’d been about 15 minutes and I started to get curious about where the guy has gone. I couldn’t just end the trip because I had his suitcase, and he put his destination as his apartment complex, so I had no place to even drop it off.
I decided to go inside the grocery store to go look around for him. I first looked in the bathroom. He wasn’t there, so I searched around the entire store. He was nowhere to be found. I went back out to my car to see if maybe he has returned there. Nope, not there. At this point, it’d been about 30 minutes and I was thinking, ‘What the heck? Where did this guy go?’ I ran inside again and did another run around the store. Still nowhere to be seen.
As I was standing by the door to the store, wondering whether the guy was even there anymore, I heard a noise in the background, this ‘ding ding ding ding’. It was a familiar sound to anyone who grew up in Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, there are slot machines everywhere. They are in gas stations, they’re in the airport, they are in grocery stores.
I kid you not, this guy went in, bought milk, and then proceeded to play slots for an hour. When I got there, I looked at the guy and I was pretty mad. But then when I really thought about it, I was actually kind of sad for the guy. The guy was obviously super addicted to gambling, to the point where he couldn’t handle going to the grocery store without throwing in some money.
So, I went over to him, tapped on the shoulder, and he looked at me. The look that he gave me was like the look little puppies give when they know they’ve done something wrong, with their tail between their legs.
He looked at me, and he said, ‘Oh no, not again!’ At this point I’m thinking ‘Wait, this guy is done this to other people too?’ Apparently so. I started to give the guy the dad talk. I got my nice voice on and said to him, ‘Hey buddy, we’ve got to go. It’s pretty late.’ He rapidly embarrassingly grabs his now lukewarm milk and proceeds to leave. I then brought him home amid awkward profuse apologies and that was the end of it.
He did give me a pretty nice tip and left me a nice review, but it was definitely one of the weirdest rides that I’ve ever had.”