Look, it happens. You spend the night out at a couple bars with some buddies, and by the time everyone is splitting up, it’s late enough and you’re lazy enough to splurge on a car instead of making the slog back on foot. We’ve all been there. Maybe you wake up the next day and grumble about the surge pricing, maybe you wish you’d just saved the bucks and walked, but then you drown your sorrows in a plate of some egg-based scramble and forget about it.
But last Friday, one unfortunate, shitfaced New Jersey man took an Uber ride that won’t be easy to forget, even though he was asleep for a lot of it—because it spanned three states and cost him $1,600.
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Kenny Bachman was visiting friends in West Virginia when he dozed off in the back of his Uber after a night of beer-and-shot deals or whatever. But when Bachman woke up, he wasn’t nursing a hangover in his friend’s place near the West Virginia University campus—he was still in the Uber, on a 300-mile drive back to his home in Gloucester County, New Jersey, NJ.com reports.
Bachman told the site that he woke up after two hours asleep in the Uber XL, completely baffled about why he was speeding down a strange highway in a car early Saturday morning. “I just woke up,” Bachman explained to NJ.com, “and I’m thinking, Why the fuck am I in the car next to some random-ass dude I don’t even know?”
The driver quickly filled Bachman in on what he missed. According to the guy behind the wheel, Bachman had requested an UberXL to pick him up and had drunkenly selected his New Jersey home as the destination. Oh, and it was Friday night, so prices were surging. At that point, Bachman was only two hours into a five-hour drive, so he could have easily just told the Uber driver to end the ride and leave him at a Rite Aid or whatever, but in his groggy state, he decided to just see the ride through all the way home.
The whole trek allegedly wound up costing $1,635.93, which Bachman initially paid. But once he was home and the hungover haze lifted, he realized that $1,600 was kind of a lot for a trip he didn’t exactly want to take.
He contested the trip to Uber, claiming that the driver messed with his phone while he was blacked out, but Bachman says the ride-share company didn’t refund the massive fare. Now, Bachman’s out more than a grand and probably had to do some explaining to the friends he ghosted in West Virginia—but he still gave the guy who drove him across multiple state lines a five-star rating, because that’s just what you do, right?
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