The Choices We Make

The Choices We Make:

20,000 Reasons to Bend

The past year of my life was, by far, the most difficult to date. The small business that I had worked so hard to build had fallen victim to the pandemic. I had taken up part time driving for Uber, and it had sufficed to pay the bills. It wasn’t great work, but it did have it’s perks. Since the bars were closed down, there were far less late night calls from people who had over indulged. Though the conversation was all but predictable, it was nice to hear people’s perspectives on how 2020 had affected them. Good and bad.

Rarely, if ever, do I remember a person’s face or details the moment after they get out of my car, but this ride was different. When I pulled up to retrieve my next passenger, Renee, nothing stood out to me. Driving other people provided many mind numbingly long days, and this was a ride that was later in the evening. Renee was dressed about as plainly as possible. Acid wash high-wasted jeans, a slightly over sized navy blue t shirt, and a small black book in hand. She plopped down in the back of my car and greeted me with a very flat “hey.” It’s not uncommon to pick up passengers that aren’t in the mood to talk, and I categorized Renee as one of these passengers right off the bat. The destination she chose was about 40 minutes away. Knowing that she wasn’t going to be a big talker, I asked if she had a radio station that she liked. Either she didn’t hear me through my mask, or she chose to ignore me, because Renee didn’t react or respond. She casually thumbed through her black note book and paid me no mind.

I made the choice to turn on the radio and let whatever was on fill the ever expanding silent void that was currently filling the car. When the radio finally landed on a station, Renee’s ears perked up. She began to wave her hand in front of her face as if the sound the radio made was disrupting some sort of deep thinking session. She asked me to turn it off and told me that she needed silence to think. Okay, Renee. Silence it is. Every now and again, I would glance in my rear view mirror to check the cars behind me. I would see Renee turning the pages or her black notebook, gazing out the window, and then jotting something down. Maybe she was a writer, and this was her process? Maybe she was going through something and this was a place that she thought she could find some clarity? Either way, any time I looked back at her, she was writing in her black notebook.

Finally, about 20 minutes into our ride, Renee spoke up. I didn’t hear her at first, so she cleared her throat, leaned forward, and asked me “do you believe people are good?” Considering this was the only real interaction we’d had, it caught me off guard. “Do I believe people are good? What do you mean” I asked. Renee sounded annoyed in response, “yeah, do you believe people are good? Like, if you had a choice to do something good or do something bad, do you think you’d do the right thing?” I had to chew on that for a minute. Was this some sort of loaded question? I know there had been plenty of negative interactions between drivers and passengers in scenarios like this, so I had to choose my next words carefully. After what seemed like forever, I responded, “I think people have the opportunity to be good as often as they have the opportunity to be bad. The choice is a byproduct of your situation. I think people make decisions that will benefit themselves first most often, but I don’t think that’s necessarily bad.” Renee stared at me in the rear view mirror and slouched back in her seat, letting out an audibly thoughtful “huh” as her back hit the seat. It seemed like whatever answer she was expecting was not the answer she had received. She jotted something into her black notebook again. Perhaps she was asking this question of multiple people and documenting the responses. I thought nothing of it, but felt proud that I gave my silent passenger something to think about.

Renee sat in silence for another 5 minutes or so before opening another conversation with me. “What do you do for a living?” she asked. “Well, now I drive a car, but I used to run my own business.” I responded. This isn’t exactly something I love talking about, but it’s a lot better than dead silence. “What kind of business did you have?” she asked. “I was a security consultant. I would tell people what kind of alarm to buy for their homes. How to avoid phone scams. Just how to keep themselves safe” I noticed that I was boring myself as I was giving my brief explanation of the business I thought I missed so much. “So, you want to protect people because you know how people can be hurt?” she said. “ I guess you could say that, yeah. It’s so easy for people to lose what they have worked so hard to earn, I wanted to help as much as I could.” I said. I could see the wheels turning in her head, but I couldn’t figure out what they were working on. She jotted something else down in her notebook. Renee didn’t know that I had lost 20,000 dollars when my business shut down, but it almost seemed like she did.

We arrived at her destination, which I didn’t realize was a courthouse. Renee took a preparatory deep breath before she got out, and thanked me for the conversation. I stayed for a moment to make sure she got inside safely, and then I drove off to my next pick up. Mindlessly driving to the next location, I noticed that Renee had left her black notebook in my back seat. Shit. It’s not uncommon for people to leave things behind, but getting it back to them has proven to be quite a challenge in the past. I grabbed the notebook and put it in the glove box, knowing that I would have to go through the process of coordinating a time and place to meet Renee to return her item. As my driving day ended, I returned home and took the notebook out of the glove box and into my house. It was strange to me that Renee had not reached out to me to try and get her notebook back. Though, she did go directly into a courthouse, so I’m sure there were more pressing issues on her mind. Though, with how often she interacted with the notebook, it seemed like it was definitely an important element of her life. I opened my app and went through the contact information from my rides for the day. I quickly found Renee’s phone number and composed a text. “Renee, this is your driver from earlier today. You left a black notebook in my car, and I wanted to get it back to you as soon as possible. Please let me know the best way for me to get it back to you.” I felt good about the text. It wasn’t creepy, it was right to the point, and hopefully it demonstrated that I deserved a good review for my ride share service.

Renee responded about 10 minutes later, simply saying, “I want you to have my notebook. I think it can help you.” I could feel the confusion dripping down my face as I pondered what Renee meant. I hadn’t opened the notebook because it was someone else’s property. Now, this person wanted me to have their property because somehow they thought it could help me? I texted Renee again, “You want me to read what’s inside?” She quickly responded “it’s your decision in the end, but I know it could help you.”

I sat down on the couch with the black notebook in my hands. I was nervous but excited. Was there really something in this book that could help me? What kind of help did Renee think I needed? I slowly cracked the book open and I was shattered by what I saw inside. On the pages of Renee’s black notebook were detailed instructions of how to scam people out money. There were lists of phone numbers next to business names along with scripts of what to say to whoever was on the end of the number you ended up calling. Pages and pages of intricate directions of how to get every last cent I could ever need to recoup my losses from my business and live any life I chose. There were even escape plans for scams that ended up failing. It was like a scam artist playbook, and it was all mine. It was my choice. Staring me in the face, breathing down my neck, was the burning question “are all people good, and am I going to be one of those people?”