Cat found after Lyft fiasco dragged on for days, Lyft to pay vet bills | Hacker News Reader

Cat found after Lyft fiasco dragged on for days, Lyft to pay vet bills

arstechnica.com

80 pointsarittr52 comments

Enormous caveat: Judging from this article, Lyft appears to be unwilling to give even a shadow of an idea of how the cat came to be lost outside. Like everybody else, I can only assume the driver abandoned it.

That said: I feel out of touch, reading all the comments on Ars to the effect of "the driver should do some soul-searching". The harshest take I've seen is a single comment suggesting that they should be fired. But this is animal abuse. It is the theft (effectively, after they realized what happened) and discarding of a stranger's beloved pet. It might have never been found. It might have died. This is not even to mention the psychological damages. The driver should face jail time.

When I think about a person doing this, I feel hatred. I can't help it, and I don't say that lightly - I can understand why people do all sorts of horrific things. But this is in the realm where I can't even imagine what it is like to have the mental framework to choose this course of action (not to say that it is more immoral than my unspoken examples of "horrific" things - of course not - but rather that it is more inexplicable, i.e. less human-seeming). Short of some extenuating circumstance that Lyft is inexplicably withholding, I have a hard time considering this behavior as anything other than a sign of simple incompatibility with society.

The thing is the idea of a crime + jailing is a legal matter, right? Let's say driver sticks to "idk what happened" and Lyft says "he did it we kicked him off our network", and then dashcam footage shows a passenger taking the carrier.

Lyft doesn't have the ability to investigate without speculating, it'd be a horrible idea for them to assert anything, though I'm 99.999% sure it was the driver too (based on the assumption a naive passenger would assume it was the driver's and it they took it, the driver would see them exit with the carrier)

Why doesn’t Lyft have the ability to investigate?

They can't, for example, issue a subpoena forcing the driver to produce any dashcam footage.

Sure, but they can ban him from driving until he does. I'd say they probably have a better capacity to investigate than the police in this circumstance.

Absolutely. This comment and the comment I replied to are worlds apart in tone and suggestion, that's why I replied to it the way I did but am seemingly breezily amenable to yours.

I'm not totally following, but it sounds like you're extrapolating my opinions. Lyft does not have to assert anything they do not have confidence in. Logically, the minimum statement they could make is "we don't know how the cat got out and are investigating."

> Lyft doesn't have the ability to investigate without speculating

They do: If they ask the driver what happened and quote him, or report that he could not be contacted, then they are not speculating.

In most states it's illegal to abandon an animal on the side of the road. Pandey could try to file a police report to hold the driver responsible.

Edit: Update from Pandey on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/16wl1hd/comment/k2x...

> Also now, that I have her back, I want to nail the POS who stole her. I'm going to ensure that they go to jail. Fuck these people. I want revenge now. Fucking coward saw what was coming for him and left her on the side of the road. Just got off the phone with APD again. They said they have assigned the car to animal cruelty unit and have multiple officers working on the case.

Yes! Justice for Tux!

The process for determining whether a driver is willing to transport a pet is asinine. Just add something to the app so the passenger can indicate that they have a pet, whether it is in a carrier, its approximate size, etc. and let the driver decide whether to take the job.

These services are already borderline questionable given all of the problems and the increased prices now that they aren't trying to put taxis out of business. The moment one must deal with someone at the company to beg for a refund or deal with any of the other problems the equation becomes pretty one-sided.

I believe Uber has a separate category of ride for this. Uber Pets or some such thing. It will only match drivers who are okay with having pets in their car.

Yes and we use this service all the time when we bring our 35lb golden doodle with us. I’d way rather wait an extra 10 minutes up front instead of getting into a 5 minute discussion with the driver about how we won’t be putting our dog in the trunk.

> we bring our 35lb golden doodle with us

I think we saw you at the $100/plate restaurant yesterday with your emotional support animal.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

They don't even have the check for kids (except NY for some reason).

You can’t discriminate against kids.

I suspect that you can, and may even be legally be required to, in any jurisdiction which requires child safety seats. "No local-law-compliant child safety seat, no service."

“I’m allergic.”

From a Gizmodo article:

> Tux was located by Lyft’s own investigators days later just a little over a mile up the road from where she was last seen, as announced by the company in a tweet this morning. [1]

It really sounds like the driver drove away and threw the cat out of the car as a form of retaliation.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/tux-the-cat-found-after-lyft-driver-sped...

I hope Lyft fires the driver. There's no excuse for dumping someone's pet on the side of the road like trash. The barrier to entry for these apps must be real low.

> There's no excuse for dumping someone's pet on the side of the road like trash.

Do we know that's what happened? It's what I assumed, but I hadn't followed this story until the article popped up on Ars, so I'm curious if there are more details.

Short of it: cat in carrier in car; driver drove off, only responded hours later; cat found days later not in carrier covered in fleas. The cat did not let itself out of the car or carrier so the driver must have, as they have no other excuse.

Indeed this whole story sounds like the driver is just a useless human. They dropped off the passenger at a pet hospital. I can't imagine how the driver realized there was still a cat in the car and did anything other than return to the pet hospital. I wonder what lyft's GPS data says, do they see the driver stop a few minutes after leaving the pet hospital, near where they found the cat?

I looked for a couple other writeups on this story, but no one seems to know how the cat got from inside the car to anywhere else. Without any details, I'm left to assume the driver is a terrible human being and simply discarded the cat on the side of the road.

>I hope Lyft fires the driver.

They aren't employees, are they? Your verbiage seems off. I know not continuing to work with an independent contractor is very similar to firing an employee, but isn't it a little different?

In the context of the comment and any reasonable conversation that's not about worker's rights, no.

They're exactly the same thing.

I'm not so sure. Why do we call them different things if it's exactly the same?

Because other contexts exist.

Technically aren’t the passengers the employer?

It would be a terms of platform violation.

I have no idea if there's a legal distinction, but I've heard of people firing contractors, and customers for that matter, so in the vernacular it seems fine.

I hope people revert back to taxis where it's an option.

Lyft and Uber are the same price as taxis - and the quality is dramatically worse now.

Are taxi's any better now? I haven't taken one in more than a decade, but in talking to taxi drivers back then it was clear that calling the cab company and asking for a pickup didn't result in any guarantees. They would call it out on the radio and if someone felt like picking you up they would. Otherwise you just wait outside the bar and wonder why there is no car.

Not to be trite and dismiss the severity of this, buuuuuuut -

I never close the car door until I've got all my things.

Not that I have the chance to check, but - I figure this both signals to the driver that I'm not done yet, and, somewhat prevents them from just driving away - they could, but then they'd have an open door while driving, and people generally don't do that.

The passenger was going around the other way though, which makes sense as routine human behavior. The driver driving off right away also normal human behavior.

But the driver not stopping after the passenger trying all sorts of banging (I know fear for self but doesn't seem like a case this way) is not normal.

That last few Lyfts I have ridden in had drivers that didn't 100% understand the English language. It's very possible they mistook the banging action as something other than "Hey, stop! I've left something in the car."

> That last few Lyfts I have ridden in had drivers that didn't 100% understand the English language. It's very possible they mistook the banging action as something other than "Hey, stop! I've left something in the car."

This is a horribly racist remark, basically saying that people from other countries are imbeciles with no understanding of basic human behavior. They can't speak English, but doesn't mean they have an intellectual disability and too stupid to understand what "hey stop" means.

That is going a little far, no? Different cultures have different norms. Are you confident none has a "knocking on the window means 'thanks, I'm good to go!'"?

Example: ambulance drivers

It's only racists if you imagine a race. I was in new york this past weekend and my uber was a similar race to me and did not understand me speaking perfectly normal english with him. I don't think that is a racist statement.

The issue here isn't that the driver misinterpreted the situation and took off. It's that they apparently behaved poorly, refusing to return the animal and then dumping it somewhere; and that Lyft customer support was equally unhelpful until the story blew up on Twitter.

The tech industry is really plumbing the depths of terrible / non-existent customer service and that's the meta story here, I suppose. Even airlines, insurance, and internet service providers tend to do better - the experience of dealing with them is usually aggravating, but you can generally reach a competent human being after a while.

With tech, we basically have a complete disregard for what our users might be dealing with, and the only way to get real help is to make your story go viral on Twitter or Hackernews.

I dont understand this "Lyft team" the article keeps on mentioning. Is this a team of Lyft employees? A team of unrelated people who organized to solve the "Lyft issue"? Lyft investigators?

Their PR department

Yes, evidently Lyft employees. The cat owner has been posting updates on a local subreddit[1], and they said:

> I also just got a call from a Lyft executive, they said they are trying to help organize a search party with their people in Austin.

The owner had reached out to Lyft on social media. The story also made the local TV news, although I'm not sure if that's why Lyft offered help (partially because I don't know which of those two things happened first).

---

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/16wl1hd/need_help_l...

WTF is wrong with that driver? How could he be so uncaring like that? All it would take is a drive back with the cat, he must have knowingly just dumped it somewhere and drove off. He should definitely get removed from the platform for that.

Lyft and Uber drivers aren’t typically the nicest people.

Cat found after Lyft fiasco dragged on for days

Definitely a fiasco, but it didn't really drag on for days. The cat was stolen and dumped on Saturday afternoon and was found by investigators hired by Lyft Monday at around 1AM. Less than a day and half to resolve.

So, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday sounds like multiple days to me. If they'd mentioned the number of hours, then you'd have a point. The reality is that 'days' was the correct (even if a little disingenuous) word.

I agree, it is correct, but disingenuous. Especially when you thrown in "dragged on".

Wild. A good highlight of, to me, perhaps the most glaring bit of BS when it comes to our cell phones et al -- the idea that just about anything in association with the tech could get lost or stolen.

These things are near perfect tracking devices, yet things like this happen; or even siller, Apple et al pretending that they couldn't (easily-but-at-a-loss-of-revenue) more-or-less never have any such thing as "a stolen iPhone."

The story is about a cat, not a phone.

Yasmine from Lyft Support seems to have made the same mistake.

Duh.

The bigger point is, with all the tracking available via two phones, there's no reason this should take this long.

Tracking of what?

The driver.

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