Autism and Employment (another PennSilverTaco thread)!

What I am getting at is in the eyes of both PennDOT and my insurance company, none of this shit has ever been on my record. The one exception, sort of, is the accident in June 2021. My PennDOT record says that I was involved in an accident on June 19th, but it does give any details like the-9 how the accident occurred or who was at fault.

I was on the insurance to drive company vehicles at two different employers (Puck and NAVMAR) no questions asked; I was also on the insurance at Fred Beans and allowed to drive some very expensive inventory.

Recently, DoorDash seems to have switched background check providers, and earlier this year these people somehow managed to dredge up the pleaded-down red light incident from January 2019. This was never on my PennDOT record, and I have no idea why DoorDash would give a shit about more than five years after it happened!

Obviously, a human did not do this. It was an algorithm. This Orwellian background check entity is constantly running checks on DoorDash drivers, even outside of the annual background period that has been in place for years, and it sends info to DoorDash that automatically locks the Dasher out of their account so corporate can review it.

In either late 2023 or early 2024, DoorDash pulled the same shit when Checkr found the 5 MPH over ticket from July 2023 (pleaded down) several months after the court date (which was in early October). Both times, I thought that my account had been deactivated and I was kicked off of DoorDash.

In Pennsylvania, you have to be going convicted of going 6 MPH or more above the posted speed limit in order to get points on your license; “5 over” is what people get it reduced to in order to avoid points.

In some states, you can get points on your license for going like 2 MPH over the posted speed limit, but in Pennsylvania cops really don’t seem to give a shit unless you’re doing more than 10 MPH over!

 

Lawyers and shitty human beings......

 

Do you mean the shitty human beings who continue to be bad drivers, or the shitty human beings running DoorDash?

 

It would appear that I am not the only one who has been having issues with Checkr…

 

This was the original Reddit post…

 

The ones that are looking for a payout.
If you own a business, and an accident happens.
There’s a lawyer out there that will take your case.
Even if you were at fault.

For instance, let’s say you were in an accident while doing door dash.
You and door dash are getting sued. Even if you weren’t at fault.

A good lawyer (ambulance chaser) will sue door dash.
They’ll say Door Dash should have done a background check.
And since you have prior driving infractions on your record, they (lawyer) will say it was negligence on Door Dash.

There would be a 2nd crucification of Jesus if there was a dollar to be made.

 

But they let me go back on DoorDash. Also, why are dredging up shit from more than five years ago that should be off my record?!?!

 

This was rarely an issue for me, but I did avoid the Starbucks in Doylestown Borough like the plague after my friend Doug (who still does DoorDash) told me this story.

There are two Starbucks locations in Doylestown, less than a mile away. Both are located on Main Street. One is located in a shopping center, directly across the parking lot from the Acme supermarket. The other one, where Doug had an encounter with an asshole, doesn’t have a drive-thru and is located on the main level of an 18th century hotel/saloon.

Doug may not have even been picking up at this Starbucks, but the parking lot was the most convenient. A good amount of the parking spots are reserved for the various offices on the the second level of the old saloon. Doug parked his car in one of these for less than ten minutes, picked up the order, and came back outside only to be angrily confronted by a man claiming to be the owner of the property.

He cussed Doug out (F-word and all), went on a rant about “GrubHub drivers”always parking in his spaces (Doug drives for DoorDash and has magnets on his car that say “DoorDash”), and threatened to have Doug’s car towed. The guy ultimately drove off and let Doug leave.

I do not believe I’ve ever picked up a DoorDash order from that Starbucks, but I routinely got Uber Eats orders from there; I’m talking half a dozen or more in the span of a few minutes; I picked up from that Starbucks once in 2023 without incident, but after Doug told me about his encounter, I refused to.

I can understand people getting angry if someone parks in a handicap spot or in front of a fire hydrant, but people seriously have their panties in a bunch of they are getting so angry about a gig worker parking their vehicle in a nothing special reserved space!

 

@ABA180
@ColoradoTJ
@Just_A_Guy
@shakerhood
@steelcity2
@Steves104x4

I am in a DoorDash Reddit group, as well as an Uber Reddit group, and the reasons to never do gig work again just keep compounding!

The most obvious one is wear and tear on my truck; I am making plenty of money right now, between my full-time job and scrapping the occasional air-conditioner, and DoorDash would in theory be a nice side hustle. However, stop-and-go suburban driving is hell on any vehicle; I have a feeling that my truck would still have the original head gasket and timing chain if I hadn’t relied so heavily on DoorDash for income after I surpassed 120K miles. My initial career with Uber Eats lasted from December 2018 to about June 2019, and then I did DoorDash from July 2019 to March 2020 because I liked it better than Uber. My truck had just over 90K miles when I started doing Uber, and I actually hit 100K in July 2019 while doing DoorDash; I didn’t do DoorDash or Uber Eats at all from March 2020 to January 2021 due to COVID. It was from the end of 2019 through November 2020 that I got into “higher than average” territory relative to my truck’s age.

The other vehicle-related issue is gas; I have determined that unless you’re in a hybrid or another vehicle that gets really good mileage, this type of gig work is not profitable unless gas is under $3 per gallon; I was making the greatest profit from December 2018 to March 2020, and from January to June of 2021, when gas was less than $2.50 per gallon.

The other issues are customers and merchants. Customers are entitled pricks who among other things expect white glove service comparable to what you might find at the Ritz-Carlton, and restaurant employees who are hostile to dashers for various stupid reasons.

I would like to get at least another 50K miles out of my truck before it needs another major overhaul, and I am not in the mood for entitled assholes who will start shit over the dumbest shit!

 

Your truck should last another 100k if you keep oil in it.

The only thing that hasn’t been replaced now is the bottom end of the engine.

 

Rear diff and driveshaft are original…

 

Those are relatively small expenses. And worth fixing with the history of your truck.

You could have both fixed and replaced for under $2k.

 

And the top end actually wasn’t replaced, just the head gasket and timing chain. Under the hood of my truck is more than 95% original!

 

I took my ex gf's youngest son out for a driving lesson the other day. He took a little life from the clutch, but had a couple decent take offs in between burn outs and stalling, lol.

 

@ABA180
@ColoradoTJ
@Just_A_Guy
@steelcity2
@Steves104x4

Another really big issue with DoorDash is that they seem to be purging veteran Dashers; I believe this is because they have too many Dashers in a lot of areas (including mine) and longtime Dashers like myself won’t accept the orders with shitty payouts.

They want younger and more naive dashers to take the low-pay orders, so they are going out of their way to deactivate the Dashers who have dignity and won’t accept them.

Within the last year, DoorDash changed the threshold for deactivation from 80% completion to 90%. I generally did not have a problem keeping my completion rate above 80%, and the reasons my completion rate suffered are because I would get a deceptively high order that ended up being two or more low-paying orders, I realized the order was farther away than expected, or I didn’t feel like going to the restaurant for various reasons; I would then cancel the order, which in itself was not a contract violation, but put me at risk of deactivation if I got below a certain percentage.

DoorDash upped the mandatory minimum completion rate to 90% and gave Dashers the chance to reset their ratings; I did this, but it didn’t take long for me to dip below 90% due to the reasons listed above. I managed to avoid deactivation.

However, while 90-95% used to be considered a “high” completion rate, it is now considered “medium”; I would not be shocked if the mandatory minimum completion rate is now 95%!

 

I logged into the Dasher app, just for grins, to see where my completion rate stands…

 

Luckily, a high acceptance rate isn’t required to stay active…

 

Have you ever had to put a clutch in that car, or is it original from 1992?