 "Uber driver allegedly misbehaves with elderly parents, and co is still 'contemplating' firing him")
Surprise, surprise. Uber has gotten some more bad publicity. This time in Bengaluru. [caption id=“attachment_1856707” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]
The Uber app. AFP.[/caption] Rastogi Anku booked an UberGO cab for his elderly parents on 17 July. However, an Uber Black driver Raju (Cab # KA 51B 7626) accepted the ride. But even before the journey could begin, an argument broke out between the driver and Rastogi over the air conditioning. “He (the driver) refused to start the AC!! He told me that I need to pay UberX fare for the AC!! I told him that he has to do as requested to which he abused me in Kannada,” Rastogi wrote on a Facebook post which has gotten over a thousand shares on the social networking site. However the altercation soon took a violent turn when the driver pushed the elderly couple out of the cab and when Rastogi’s father resisted he too faced abuses. However since Rastogi did not want to create a scene, he writes that he asked his parents to step out of his cab and then took pictures of the driver that he posted along with his complaint. When he tried to write to Uber about his experience he faced another problem: Uber limits the message one can send to only 5MB. His only resort was to rant on Facebook. Read his full experience here:
UberSummary:You guys are bunch of idiots who love to believe that you are a tech company whereas you are clearly a…
Posted by Rastogi Ankur on Thursday, 16 July 2015
Later Rastogi commented that someone from Uber got in touch and told him that the company is still contemplating whether to ‘keep him on the rolls or not’ “We have had a dialogue with the driver and have given him stern warning and are contemplating if he should be on our roll…We cannot divulge the details of what we have discussed & planning to do with him but can you please update your Facebook post and mention that this issue is resolved?”, is what an Uber executive reportedly told Ankur. Unsurprisingly, there is a thread on Quora titled, “How is service of Uber in India?” where people have written about some of their own experiences. Here are some other terrible experiences faced while using Uber. #1 Ajith Balakrishnan writes, that the Uber driver threw him out of the cab in the middle of nowhere after a verbal tiff when the Uber driver yelled at the customer for not giving a better landmark at the pick up point since he had to take “too many turns.” Nobody from Uber has responded to his email, tweet or FB post. #2 An Uber cab driver was arrested in Kolkata for an alleged obscene act in the presence of a woman passenger in the cab, police said on Tuesday (21 July). A 25-year-old woman complained that while travelling in the cab from Elgin Road to Netaji Nagar on 8 July, she noticed through the looking glass that the driver was “masturbating with one hand and driving with the other”. Read the full report here . #3 On 21 July, Firstpost’s Sunainaa Chadha realised why Mumbai’s good, old, ‘Kaali Peeli’ is much better than Uber in a crisis. Not only did Uber charge 3x the amount for minimum distance travelled, they also left their passenger stranded during a deluge. Read the entire story here . Despite numerous other experiences like this, there is definitely a delay in redressing customer grievance, and there appears to be another problem: Uber’s privacy policy does not allow them to disclose what action they have taken on customer complaints. ( Read more about it in the NewsMinute article) . Moreover, the only helpline number provided by Uber on the internet is an international customer support number that is of no use for people in India. The company seriously needs to get its act together and ensure constructive change rather than just promising a ‘dialogue’ with its drivers.