After six months of driving for Uber, Victoria Miller has already put her own personal touch on passengers’ experiences.
Rather than displaying a sticker representing the transportation network, Miller includes “Vicky’s Uber” written in a bright-pink sign and a personalized license plate on her white SUV.
“They know that Victoria is coming to get them so if you put something bright on the car to make them see it, it’s going to help,” Miller said, noting passengers do not normally notice the small square Uber sticker drivers typically have.
The 58-year-old has driven more than 3,000 passengers, many of whom she has had conversations with on a range of topics.
One such passenger was from North Carolina.
“I like to joke with people and I said, ‘Oh, you’re from North Carolina, where I’m not allowed to pee in the ladies’ room,’” Miller said. “He said, ‘And rightfully so.’”
Miller asked the passenger about his background and learned he had a son and daughter.
“If your son comes to you in a year and says, ‘Dad, I’m transgender. I want to be a girl. Do you want him to be living as a woman and walk into a men’s room?’” Miller posed to him. “I said, ‘Imagine me going to an Eagles game with a bunch of drunk men and I walk into a men’s room. You tell me how much fun that would be. I would probably get the living hell beaten out of me. What do you think is going to happen in the women’s room? Nothing. I’m going to go pee. I’m going to go check my makeup. I’m going to wash my hands and I’m going to leave. That’s all that’s going to happen.’”
The passenger told Miller that it “just gives license to perverts,” to which Miller replied that conservatives were only giving the “perverts an idea.”
“Trans women have been using women’s rooms forever. Before all these bills, as long as we had our letter from our therapist saying that we’re transgender, we went in the bathrooms and there was no problem.”
The passenger offered suggestions like having a separate bathroom for transgender people; Miller said that proposal harkened back to the “separate-but-equal” facilities for black people in the 1950s. He also recommended that transgender people should only be able to use the correct bathroom after gender-confirmation surgery.
“Am I going to wear a badge that says, ‘I have a vagina now’?” Miller recalled saying. “My outward appearance isn’t going to change once I get that. My voice isn’t going to change. My face isn’t going to get all of a sudden prettier because I have a vagina.”
According to Miller, the passenger said he found the conversation “very enlightening.”
However, not all of her passenger conversations have had positive outcomes. She noted one experience the day after the 2016 presidential election.
“[The passenger] called and she said, ‘Is this Victoria?’ I said, ‘Yes ma’am.’ She goes, ‘You sound like a man.’ I said, ‘Well, honey, I’m transgender so that’s why I have a deeper voice.’ And she chuckled and she said, ‘Donald Trump’s going to get your ass.’ She hung up and canceled the ride.”
The passenger filed a “false driver report” claiming that a man was coming to pick her up instead of a woman. Uber temporarily suspended Miller’s account.
“I couldn’t believe somebody would be that hateful to do something like that,” Miller said.
But such encounters are rare, she said.
“For every schmuck in the world, there’s a nice person.”
Miller remembers driving a woman who was crying after a breakup with her boyfriend and transporting a passenger so she could be alongside her mother in hospice care.
One passenger Miller noted had stage-four breast cancer and was going to die. Miller held hands with the passenger and said a prayer.
“My dad had this mantra: ‘You’re not allowed to profit off of someone’s misfortune or misery,’” Miller said.
With this in mind, she refunded the ride.
“You think that this is just a job transporting people from one place to another. It’s not,” Miller said. “You literally get to touch people’s lives for a minute and they touch yours in some pretty emotional ways, sometimes.”
While Miller has had some emotional rides, she also said she likes joking with her passengers. Miller had two riders from New Hampshire who were heading home after job training in Philadelphia.
“Hopefully [the flight is] not overbooked and you’re on United [Airlines] and need boxing gloves,’” Miller joked, with a reference to the recent incident in which authorities dragged a passenger out of his seat on an overbooked United flight.
While the passengers laughed at Miller’s joke, they also discussed the issue in-depth.
Miller also said she likes being exposed to different cultures while driving for Uber. She grew up in Turnersville, N.J., which she described as a “suburban, predominantly white neighborhood.”
Miller recalled a time when she picked up four Muslim passengers.
“You don’t get any further far right or far left than us.”
She said the five of them all looked at each other before lapsing into silence. Miller took this opportunity to do what she usually does with passengers: have fun.
“I had to think of something funny to say. So I say, ‘This kind of sounds like the beginning of a bar joke. There are four Muslims and a transsexual in an Uber car,’” Miller said. “They cracked up laughing. The girl said, ‘Oh, that’s really funny.’ And I said, ‘Wait a minute, Donald Trump said you’re not allowed to talk.’ She got a kick out of that.”
Eventually one of the males became serious, saying their culture doesn’t “understand why [she] would make the choice that [she has] done to [herself].”
“I said, ‘It’s not a choice to do what I did to myself. Really, what it comes down to is the choice to live or die,’” Miller said. “If I didn’t transition and become the woman I was meant to be, I would’ve had to cease to exist because many trans women get to that point.”
While Miller said the situation was tense, it had a positive outcome.
“We got to share a moment in time together, learn about each other, even laugh with each other and the interesting thing is we didn’t want to kill each other,” Miller said with a laugh. “This is a lesson in life. If we would only stop and learn to talk with each other, listen to each other and maybe try to see someone else’s point of view, maybe there would be far less violence in the world. It’s a fun thing.”
Miller also shares personal stories of her own with passengers.
On PGN’s recent ride-along, Miller drove a college student to her university and talked about coming out as transgender six years ago. At the time, she said, she had a photo ready to be uploaded on her Facebook page and sat at the computer for two hours with her hand shaking on the mouse.
“I hit ‘Send,’ shut my phone off and I went to bed,” Miller told the passenger.
The next morning, she received 200 voicemails and her Facebook “blew up” with congratulatory messages.
The passenger was quiet during the ride with the exception of the occasional comment but she still noted Miller’s impact on her day.
“Thank you,” the passenger said as she got out of the car. “It was nice meeting you.”
“Congratulations,” she added.
While Miller is usually one to make a joke, she quietly uttered two words back with an almost-shy quality: “Thank you.”