Pick Up on Dodgy Street

Is it just me, or are things like Uber basically well dodgy?  I don't mean their business model as such, (although I do think that it is entirely exploitative), but just the very concept of allowing any Tom , Dick or Harry to go around picking up complete strangers for money, in whatever vehicle they might be driving.  I mean, from a customer point of view, you just don't know who is going to pick you up.  f you are lucky, you might just find yourself sharing the backseat with a freshly dug up corpse if you are picked up by the local necrophiliac, (unless, of course, he's hijacked a hearse before picking you up, in which case the corpse will be neatly boxed).   If you are unlucky, you could get a pick up from the local serial killer, who takes you on a detour to find a convenient place to bury his latest victim.  More seriously, bearing in mind that even some black cab drivers - who have to licenced and vetted - turn out to be sex offenders - and let's not mention the number of mini cab drivers who have turned out to be sex murderers - then how can Uber, with its army of unlicenced drivers (the only criteria they seem to have to meet is to have access to a car) possibly assure customers that they are safe?  To be quite blunt, you might just as well use an app which promises to hook you up with a sex offender (if someone hasn't already come up with such a thing in reality) - you'd probably be putting yourself at less risk (you can be sure that a significant percentage of those registering with the app as sex offenders will be bull shitters).

It isn't just Uber which seems dodgy to me - what about Airbnb?  Does anyone other than me think that renting your house out as a holiday home to complete strangers simply isn't a good idea?  Again, you could end up with just about any freak or weirdo living in your home while you are away.  You could come home to find that the holidaying 'family' you rented it to for two weeks were actually a bunch of Hell's Angels who have set up meth lab in your bathroom.  Or you could find that those nice Nuns from Austria who you let to were actually running their traveling international knocking shop out of your bedroom (and probably every other room in the place - you'll be scrubbing for months to get those stains out of the lining room carpet).  Not to mention all the acid bath murderers and assorted crazies using your bath to dissolve bodies or your kitchen to dismember them.  Oh, and be prepared to recognise your house in various online porn loops.  You might as well just leave your door unlocked when you go away yourself and allow the world and his wife to wander in and out of your house at will.  not, of course, that I'm at risk from any of these eventualities, even if I were foolish enough to put my property on Airbnb, as nobody is ever going to want to spend their holidays here in Crapchester.  Not even the criminally insane weirdos.

Yet, despite the obvious - to me, at least - lunacy of these so called services, they seem to be making someone, somewhere, money.  So, what similarly whacky ideas could we come up with to try and emulate their success?  With the cost of funerals rising, why not have an Uber-type app which will allow you to dial up a hearse?  Well, I say hearse, in reality you'll probably find your loved one's casket traveling to the crematorium or cemetery in an ice cream van, or strapped to the roof of a Ford Mondeo estate.  But what the hell - it'll be cheaper than using an undertaker.