Hospitals and extended-stay hotels are your enemy. The combo ride is the final boss.

I know better than to blindly take clinic/hospital rides and extended-stay rides. Today Lyft got me anyway.

Offer comes in with decent pay. Pickup? Just an address. No clinic name that I recognized. Drop-off? Another address on the edge of town that I didn’t recognize. Pay looked good, so fuck it. Accepted.

I arrive.

Clinic.

Passenger comes out in a wheelchair.

Okay. Here we go.

Complete the ride and discover where the mystery drop-off address leads:

Extended-stay hotel.

They fucking combo’d me.

And the passenger’s odor was so bad that after dropping her off I had to stop working, sanitize the car, disinfect everything, and air it out before putting another passenger in there. The best description I can give you is onion pizza. My entire car smelled like fucking onion pizza.

Lyft specifically doesn’t reimburse cleaning fees for unpleasant smells, either, so that’s just downtime you eat.
This is why I treat hospitals, clinics, and extended-stay hotels as high-risk ride archetypes. It’s not that every passenger from these places is a problem. Obviously they aren’t. It’s that the probability of getting a ride involving mobility assistance, excessive wait time, third-party scheduling, hygiene issues, belongings, or some other complication seems dramatically higher.

And sometimes you can’t filter for it because Lyft gives you an address instead of a recognizable business name. You cannot memorize every clinic and every extended-stay address in the city.

I’ve also noticed something interesting: some of these rides pay suspiciously well relative to otherwise similar trips. My completely unproven theory is that Lyft’s pricing eventually has to increase on rides that drivers repeatedly reject or that are otherwise difficult to match. I can’t prove Lyft is pricing any specific passenger or location differently, so don’t take that as fact. But when an unusually juicy offer appears, I’ve learned to ask myself:

Why is this ride paying me this much?

Today I found out.

Clinic. Extended stay.

The final boss.

And here’s the fucking kicker: I finished the ride, cleaned and disinfected the car, typed up this entire post, and after all that IT STILL SMELLS LIKE FUCKING ONION PIZZA IN HERE.

So I’m apparently out of commission for the next hour or so while the car airs out.

Great-paying ride, though.