After delivering the customer to the designated location very late, returning home is often not an easy task for the driver.
"Driver!" Seeing a female car leader/follower walk out of a seafood restaurant in Huizhou, the driver, Forrest Gump, pushed his folding electric car and followed the guest to the parking lot in small steps.
After 8:30 pm, the dinner at the hotel ended one after another, and the driver entered the peak period of receiving orders. That day, Forrest Gump waited outside the restaurant for more than two hours before finally receiving the first business. From Huicheng District Sanhuan South Road to Jiangbei District, about 10 kilometers away, the driver costs 46 yuan, which is almost twice the fare of a taxi.
Along the way, the female car owners complained about the high fees for chauffeur driving, and she felt that it was more reasonable to refer to the taxi fare standard. As a woman, she has more concerns about this kind of service, which is mostly used at night and after drinking, and the standardization of the industry is also the demand of most chauffeur customers.
Forrest Gump, 31, is noncommittal. He has been working full-time as a chauffeur for three years, and he only feels that money is getting harder and harder to make. Although the cake is getting bigger and bigger, there are more chauffeurs, and everyone gets less and less. This means he has to spend more time working to maintain his income. Now he works about 11 hours a day, and can only take four or five orders at most, earning an average of about 200 yuan a day.
According to the "2018 Entertainment Index Report" released by the National Big Data Research Center of a generation driving platform, last year, the number of times that the national generation driving was used reached 267 million times. According to analysts’ estimates, the output value of the national network generation driving exceeded 10 billion yuan. Some industry insiders said that, unlike first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Huizhou has a large gap between the demand for generation driving and the population, and there is still a large space for expansion of the driver market.
As with the development of many new Internet formats, as competition intensifies, labor costs will decrease accordingly. This can be seen in groups such as express drivers, takeaways, couriers, etc., and now the Huizhou driver market is showing the same trend. In order to make a living, driver drivers wait patiently in countless dark nights, or struggle to change.
wait
Outside a large bar, where neon lights flicker on the facade of Huizhou’s famous nightclub, more than a dozen chauffeurs sit scattered on one side of the parking lot, their bodies swaying in colorful colors against the light.
Every night at about 9 o’clock, Forrest Gump will "report" here after delivering an order at the seafood restaurant. Compared with the system sending an order, Forrest Gump is more willing to wait for the order directly, because "the proportion of the system single platform is 5% higher than the order". Moreover, as a small driving platform adopts a low-price strategy to attract many customers, the system order volume of Forrest Gump’s mainstream driving platform is affected.
In the driving market, there were "many monks and few porridge". In the past, drivers could receive orders even when they sat at home, but now they may not have orders when they wait outside the restaurant. If they could receive an order every two hours, it would be considered "a lot of results".
Waiting is a compulsory course for every driver.
Forrest Gump has his own pastime, and he enjoys the freedom of this profession to a certain extent. In the driving line, the morning game is before 10 pm, and the night game is after the early morning. In the morning game, outside the seafood restaurant, Forrest Gump will play a few games of billiards with the "driving brothers" every day to kill time. The cost of venue rental, plus the money for buying cold drinks, Forrest Gump spent more than ten yuan before opening.
At night time, Forrest Gump will move to the vicinity of the bar. At this time, Forrest Gump and other chauffeurs always have a lot of excitement. Young people who dress up fashionably come in and out, and when people are drunk, they will inevitably stage a farce. Late at night on August 5, the traffic police routinely checked drunk driving on the nearby road. A young man was investigated for driving after drinking and fled back to the bar for fear of being punished. The traffic police chased all the way in.
The chauffeur who was waiting on the side began to discuss: "Alas, this kind of thing happens often…" "I know this person, he is a friend of the driver of XX, and I have sent him before." "Why bother? Why drive after drinking?" "If the traffic police were there to check drunk driving every day, our business would be good."
Forrest Gump doesn’t like Douyin. Most of the time, he gathers with other drivers to blow water and chat. From the anecdotes of driving to the trivia of life, there seems to be an endless amount of things to say. This time of talking about the mountains is particularly rare for Ah Fatty, who is facing a midlife crisis. "I can briefly forget the pressure of life," he said.
Fatty is over 40 years old and has two children, one in primary school and the other in junior high school. Because his household registration is not in Huizhou, his child’s choice of school brings him a lot of financial pressure. Unlike Forrest Gump, in order to save 10 yuan a day on mineral water expenses, he will specially bring a bottle of chilled water from home, wrap it in a white plastic bag and put it in his backpack. He always calculates the drink bit by bit, trying not to spend money on water.
Fatty decided to work at night as a full-time chauffeur to accompany his children as they grew up. During the day, when his wife went to work, he was responsible for preparing meals for the children and taking them to and from school. Due to lack of rest, when waiting for orders outside the bar, Fatty always slept first. He sat on a small plastic bench with his eyes closed, leaning against the stone pier next to him, holding his bag in his arms.
Sometimes the wait is a long intermission; sometimes the wait is fruitless. Mingge, who is in his 50s, waits for orders every day outside a hotel near his home. One day earlier this month, he didn’t receive an order until midnight. Anxious, he rode his electric bike around the parking lot. "Boss, do you want to drive?" Whenever a guest came out of the hotel, he would approach and ask.
It was raining late in the morning, and he did not receive any orders. The rain got heavier and heavier, and Brother Ming moved the electric car to the hotel porch. He carefully wiped the rain off the car and waited for his son to drive him home.
livelihood
"Hello, × × driving. May I ask where you are? Okay, wait a moment, I’ll be there right away." At 11:40 pm, A Bin, speaking with a Henan accent, received a system dispatch.
This order had to go from Maidi in Huicheng District to Daya Bay, and he didn’t return to the city until about 2 am the next day. He didn’t finish work and go home, but went to the hotel where the night show was waiting for the order, and just happened to receive another close order. At that time, there were no other chauffeurs waiting for the order outside the hotel.
Abin is the older driver who often waits for orders outside the hotel. He just turned 50 this year and has been a full-time driver in Huizhou for four years. About five years ago, Abin’s business in his hometown failed. He traveled more than 1,500 kilometers south and planned to go to Huizhou to fight again.
"When you have money, other people are always the first and last." A Bin felt that this society was very realistic, and he wanted to escape the past environment and familiar eyes and start over. After settling down in Huizhou, A Bin worked in the wine business and was cheated of tens of thousands of yuan. He worked as a security guard, but his monthly income of more than 2,000 yuan could not support himself at all.
I heard that the income of the driver is considerable, and he has never stayed overnight in the past. He works the night shift. Abin leaves the house at 6 pm every day, finishes work around 3 am, and takes two or three days of proper rest a month, earning more than 6,000 yuan. Excluding daily expenses such as rent, he can also save two or three thousand yuan a month. "I have a son and a daughter, and my daughter is married. I want to plan for my son to get married now," Abin said.
As Ah Bin slowly got older, he could clearly feel the impact of staying up late for a long time. "In recent years, my hair has obviously turned a lot whiter, and my body has become weaker than before." Even so, he can only make money like this. "I’m so old, and I don’t have any skills, so it’s hard to find a job that is comparable to the income of driving."
The low barrier to entry is an important reason for attracting many full-time chauffeurs. Ah Shu is a "post-90s generation" with five brothers and sisters. Because his family conditions did not allow it, he dropped out of primary school before finishing primary school. At the age of 15, Ah Shu left his hometown Chaoshan and traveled to various parts of the Pearl River Delta to work. It was not until 2012 that he married a Huizhou girl that he stabilized. Ah Shu is the only source of income for the family, but he "has neither education nor skills", so he had to find a way out.
Among the group of chauffeurs, a large part-time drivers are part-time drivers. They are more interested in the freedom of chauffeur time and can also subsidize their family. Li Dawei came to Huizhou from Shanxi to work hard. Now he is the owner of a small IT company and started working part-time as a chauffeur during the Spring Festival this year. "I am idle at night. It is better to come out and work part-time to subsidize my family."
In early August, Li Dawei had just handed over the house he bought in Zhongkai, and he had to pay off the mortgage of more than 3,000 yuan per month. He hoped to use the income from part-time driving to pay for this expenditure. Li Dawei would finish work at 1 am when he took orders, and usually woke up at 8:30 in the morning. His energy during the day was obviously not as good as in the past.
Sometimes, Li Dawei also entertained customers at night, and would also ask for a chauffeur after drinking. After experiencing the change of identity, when he was a chauffeur, not only did he not have a sense of difference, but he was more understanding and understanding. "Everyone drinks differently, and some people can’t control their emotions after drinking, and it is inevitable that their attitude will be bad."
However, most chauffeurs have to experience initial discomfort to "ignore" the rudeness of some drunk customers. This is the case with Forrest Gump. If he hadn’t been struggling in society after graduating from high school, if his wife hadn’t been pregnant at the time, he felt that he might not have been able to hold on.
When he first worked as a substitute driver, Forrest Gump was very nervous and just happened to bump into a new car. "He braked suddenly as soon as he stepped on it, and the customer scolded him three or four times in a row." In the first half of the year, if he was really angry, he would retort a few words.
As a driver, Forrest Gump also wants to be understood and respected. He is tired of always wrangling with customers for detours or not, and he is tired of being worried about not getting the money he deserves. Forrest Gump said that once, the customer said a lot of compassionate words to him, and he was very touched and insisted on forfeiting the driver’s fee.
Way Back
The night and the alcohol did not warm up the feelings between the driver and the passengers. No matter what they saw or heard, the memory of the passers-by would soon be put on the shelf. The driver was the "ferryman" in the city at night. They brought the owner home safely, and the next step was to return home alone.
Unlike first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Huizhou quiets down early at night, and public transportation usually stops at 10 pm. If the driver really receives a distant order, he may not be able to return home without a lot of trouble.
Mr. Li once sent a customer back to Shenzhen, where it was almost 3am. The driver’s fee was 240 yuan, and the customer tipped an extra 300 yuan. "The customer was worried that I wouldn’t be able to go home, so he asked me to stay in Shenzhen for one night before leaving." Unwilling to spend the money, Li Dawei rode an electric car to find a driver-sharing point in Shenzhen, and spent dozens of yuan to return to Huizhou.
However, not all neighboring cities have such carpooling points, like Dongguan. If he receives an order to Dongguan, Ah Bin often stays up all night. Because the driving platform Guanhui Network can also take orders in Dongguan, he roams the streets all night. If he is really tired, he finds an Internet cafe to pass the time and waits for a ride back to Huizhou at dawn.
Only at the moment of receiving the order will the driver know their destination, and they have no right to refuse. Every time an order is received, it is like a lottery draw. When luck is bad, there may be far orders in nooks and crannies, and the round-trip process becomes "difficult".
At the beginning of last month, A Jun, a full-time driver, received such an order, covering a distance of 70 to 80 kilometers from Huicheng District to Boluoyuanzhou Town. When A Jun delivered the customer to the community, it was already more than 4 am, and the farthest range of the folding electric car was only 70 kilometers, so he couldn’t return home for a while. A Jun simply chatted with the security guard of the community until dawn before taking the bus back to Huicheng.
About a week ago, Forrest Gump also encountered "misfortune" on his way home. The journey from Huicheng District to Huidong Shili Silver Beach was nearly 70 kilometers, and it was already 4 am when he arrived. Forrest Gump originally planned to go to Tamsui from Baihua Avenue to carpool, but he mistakenly turned the navigation into a cycling mode, and the route was full of mountain roads without passing through Tamsui.
Gump grew up in the countryside and was not afraid of riding in the mountains in the early morning, but he was afraid of dogs. The little local dogs along the way chased him all the way for two kilometers. Looking back now, Gump still has lingering fears. That morning, Gump rode his electric car slowly and took about 5 hours to return to his home in Gutangao.
The house was rented by Forrest Gump. The house they bought in Zhongkai was only handed over last month, and they had to pay off the mortgage of more than 3,000 yuan every month. On the 27th of this month, Forrest Gump’s wife was due to give birth, and their second child was about to be born. As a father and husband, Forrest Gump had a heavier burden on his shoulders.
"Driving a driver is a transitional job, and I still need to find a job with social security in the future." Forrest Gump thought that it would be a good choice to drive in a regular logistics company like SF Express or become a professional electrician in the future. However, both positions require corresponding qualifications, and Forrest Gump has not yet obtained them.
Forrest Gump likes a freer career. He doesn’t want to enter the factory anymore and works like a "photocopier" every day. "Young people have been doing substitute driving for a long time, and people have become lazy, and they have become less and less combat and willpower." Forrest Gump is trapped in his comfort zone and can’t take the first step. But he also knows clearly that this is not his way back. (At the request of the interviewee, A Fat, A Shu, and Li Dawei in the article are all pseudonyms.) (Text: Southern Daily reporter, Yu Lei, Photo: Southern Daily reporter, Wang Changhui)
