Family & Work
Before I go online, who needs a ride home?
Our Brady Bunch calendar gets first refusal on a driving shift. I built an app because finding a free window had become a job of its own.
By Hudson · · 2 min readIn our house, “Who’s picking them up?” is a serious planning question. School, practices, games, work. We have a blended family, and the transportation schedule can feel like a small business before I have accepted a single paid ride.
That is the attraction of rideshare: I can look for work in the gaps. But an empty rectangle on a calendar isn’t necessarily a usable shift. I need to know where the last family trip ends, where the next one starts, and how much driving sits between those two points.
Then there is the ride near the end of the window. It may pay well and take me in exactly the wrong direction. I can’t assess that offer properly if the only thing I’m considering is what it earns while the passenger is in the car. I still have to get back for the person whose ride home was arranged before I went online.
I built a scheduling app to put those family trips together. The first goal was to see who needed to be where and who was driving. The next was to find the time I could reasonably offer to Uber or Lyft. I wanted the answer before getting into the car, with room for the ordinary delays that happen in a real afternoon.
This is where the advertised flexibility meets the family calendar. I can choose when to work. I still have to choose a window that works. A plan that uses every available minute leaves me depending on every pickup, road, and handoff going exactly as expected. I know enough about driving to be uncomfortable with that plan.
It also changes how I judge the shift afterward. The money matters. So does where I finished and whether I made the next commitment without scrambling. If I spend the final part of the afternoon driving back across town, that time belongs somewhere in my assessment of the work.
I’m an entrepreneur and a tech developer, so perhaps building software was inevitable. Still, it is funny to explain that one of my first rideshare tools started with the family needing to get to school and practice. Before I could optimize a shift, I had to find one.