Thursday, September 27, 2018

Whatever Happened to Common Sense?

I've thought about this a few times in the past few weeks and I'm sure it's something that has come to your mind occasionally also.  Something happens or something is said and you ask yourself, "isn't that just common sense?"  Maybe it's not and common sense isn't really that common?

Today a driver told me he was waiting for his skid of boxes to arrive and it did with a couple other skids for drivers who had already left because it was late.  He asked the worker if he could have his skid now so he could get going, but the worker insisted on spending time on the other two skids that were not going anywhere. Then, he said, he would give the driver what he needed.  Common sense should have told him to give the waiting driver what he needed immediately.

Here's another example: it's pick on Uber day.  My wife and I both enjoy driving for Uber and a lot of people across the world enjoy getting rides through Uber.  However, we both have noticed in our short experience with Uber that they seem to lack common sense when it comes to administrative issues.  This was our third issue with them:

My wife bought a new car and turned in her leased car so she could drive more for Uber.  She got a temporary registration, but Uber would not accept it.  They use another company, Checker, to handle their screening of drivers and Checker said they needed the official registration before she could drive again.  Of course the temporary one is okay with the police, but not for Checker and Uber.  Lyft, is another company like Uber, and they accepted the temporary registration immediately.

About a week or so later we got the official registration, but they then decided to do another background check on my wife which they had done in November.  In doing this, they don't allow people to drive and it takes about 7-10 days.  Why you would keep an existing driver off the road to run a background check does not make any sense, but they did it.

Finally, they determined that my wife could not drive for Uber because her driving license had expired.  Can you buy a new car with an expired license? I don't think so, wouldn't that be common sense that it's not possible to do that?  Of course they were looking at her NEW JERSEY LICENSE! Why would they be looking at a license in another state when they had her South Carolina license on file? Why would a New Jersey license matter in South Carolina? Isn't that common sense.

It took another week or so in talking with Checker and Uber trying to get them to understand that they made a silly or stupid mistake.  They decided to run another background check and what a surprise, she passed.  Meanwhile my wife has been unable to drive for Uber for four weeks.  Who loses? It's a loss for everyone, because they just lacked some common sense.

Maybe we should appreciate common sense more when we see it?


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