If I was that driver, you bet I'd be contacting Uber to try and get your friend banned for life. Threatening a driver is never ok, even less so when it's not his fault.
It may well have been very dangerous, but realistically it is hard to make dropping someone off in a residential area a crime. Threatening a driver with physical violence is definitely a crime though.
I really do not care how uncomfortable it makes the driver to move a family a few extra blocks to somewhere vaguely safe. I’d similarly threaten him if he tried to drop my family off in a forest, or on the side of a highway, even if that’s what the GPS, God’s Position System, tells them to do.
If your job ends in a way that someone who was your customer is now in danger, you absolutely deserve to be threatened.
I disagree, but I wasn’t actually there. I only heard one side of the story.
I just do not care if my customer service agent has a bad time after putting me in a dangerous situation.
Do people not realize that this is how the world works? If you are serving customers, putting them IN DANGER, yes EVEN if it was at their own request, is what is actually wrong.
You don’t let someone ride a roller coaster unrestrained. You don’t let someone eat room temperature meat. You don’t drop a family off in an extremely dangerous neighborhood. Any employee would be right to be ridiculed for allowing any of these things - ESPECIALLY when a child is concerned.
I've lived in urban areas my whole life. Including some of the largest cities in North America. While there's places I consider higher risk, and routes I wouldn't typically take, simply existing in some neighborhood in Milwaukee isn't some existential threat to life and limb.
Keep your head down and walk a few blocks to somewhere safer and get a cab/uber/lyft out of there if needed.
Heck, book another Uber, you know at least one driver is in the neighborhood.
As for booking another Uber, anyone that has lived in less-than-pristine areas, knows that these neighborhoods can be “blacklisted.” You can’t get Ubers or cabs to come in.
Nobody who has ever been in a dangerous neighborhood would have this opinion unless they’re truly callous
I don’t think that it would be OK to threaten any customer service person with physical harm (but it happens all the time, nonetheless. Check out notalwaysright.com), but I also know that customer service people have a responsibility to ensure the safety of their patrons. Kicking folks out in a bad neighborhood could have cost Uber quite a bit, and it’s surprising that there seemed to be no recourse. It’s entirely possible the driver was ignorant of company policy.
"Being an asshole" is in the eye of the beholder. Plenty of people thing CEOs are assholes, you are saying that it is "always ok, and even cool" to threaten them? Some people think that religious folks are assholes. Some people think blue haired lefty folks are assholes.
I think you need better criteria for violence than "I think this person is an asshole". Even if you had a standard definition for asshole, threatening violence is an escalation. Someone flips you the bird, sure, they are an asshole, doesn't mean you can move to threatening to punch them.
The driver doesn't know these people, doesn't have any protection against them should they do something unpredictable or make a mess of his car outside of the Uber ride. The driver is also making a threat assessment here -- "why did they have me drive to this place and then insist I drive somewhere else? Is this a scam somehow? Is this a precursor to a violent crime?"