Byron Siegal grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended Clark University and received a Bachelor’s Degree in 1971. He obtained an MBA from the University of Hartford in 1974. In 1978 he started with Ethan Allen furniture as a district manager for upstate New York and Canada. He was there until he decided to go to law school. He gr
Byron Siegal grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended Clark University and received a Bachelor’s Degree in 1971. He obtained an MBA from the University of Hartford in 1974. In 1978 he started with Ethan Allen furniture as a district manager for upstate New York and Canada. He was there until he decided to go to law school. He graduated number two in the class from Vermont Law School in 1984 and moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to open a law practice. He practiced law in New Hampshire and Maine until 2006 when he retired from the practice of law. During the time of his law practice he developed a jazz camp for adults which ran for thirty-five years. Participants came from all over the world. Along the way Byron became a flight instructor, CFII and a large part of his life has been flying for enjoyment. In 2017 Byron moved to Boston for medical reasons to be closer to the site of his clinical trial. That’s when he started driving for Uber. Two months after the Uber beginning, the idea for a book percolated when he seemed to meet collaterally related people. In one two-day period he met four venture capitalists that invest only in biotech companies. One venture capitalist had invested in a biotech company developing a DNA strand to inject into the ears of genetically deaf people. A month later he ran into a researcher worked on drugs for deaf people. She knew the company the company working on a DNA strand, Akkuos. The drug has just been in the news for a successful trial with an Indonesian boy. It was after these meetings that he decided to write a book. Fifty-four interviews later. This is the book.
THE RIDESHARE DIARIES
RIDERS SHARE THEIR SECRETS
BY BYRON SIEGAL ‧
RELEASE DATE: N/A
An absorbing glimpse of America through the lens of a ride-share driver.
An Uber driver shares stories from behind the wheel in this debut nonfiction book.
As a soon-to-be 75-year-old, Siegal has held multiple jobs that range from stints as a jazz musician and owner of a soft-serve frozen yogurt store to working as a lawyer and flight instructor. In 2019 he added another occupation to his resume: Uber driver. By 2023, having clocked more than 18,000 Uber trips, he understood the truism that “Everyone has a story.” With their permission, he shares fascinating anecdotes and chronicles from 30 customers, hoping their personal triumphs will “inspire” readers. Those interviewed are as eclectic as they are fascinating. In back-to-back chapters, readers meet Grace, a professional dominatrix who pulls back the curtain on the life of a sex worker; these salacious stories are followed immediately by reflections from Tim, a United States Air Force veteran and IT manager for a hospital. Many of the stories present microcosms of 21st-century society; Sarah, for instance, works as a restaurant manager with an advanced college degree and an expertise in critical race theory. Likewise, Kerry had previously worked as an associate editor for Boston Magazine and a literary agent for a business that catered to academics; after putting her career on hold to have kids, however, she soon found that “she couldn’t make a living” and now works as a pre-school teacher. Interspersed throughout the stories are vignettes from Siegal’s own admittedly eccentric life (such as a romantic relationship with a Russian translator he met through an Eastern European dating site) as well as commentary on “life lessons” he has learned from his Uber clients. Written during the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the stories offer unique perspectives on the crisis, including that of biophysicist Krishna, who studied the molecular structure of the virus. As an elderly driver “afraid for my health,” Siegal recalls that many of his customers didn’t wear masks, and that most who did wear them didn’t “do so correctly.” The author’s engaging writing style, revealing a gifted storyteller, graces a well-organized text accompanied by black-and-white cartoon drawings.
An absorbing glimpse of America through the lens of a ride-share driver.
1. HOW RIDERS
GET WHAT THEY WANT
PERSISTENCE
I don’t have a Plan B. I’m not poor but I have to work seven days a
week to keep going. I’m seventy-four, about to be seventy-five. Who
is going to hire me? Through some bad planning and bad luck, I’ve
ended up needing to work every day just to have what I need to live.
I’m an attorney (retired) and I’m a flight instructor, and yet I drive for
Uber to pay the bills.
When I first thought of this book, I was in my car driving an Uber
passenger. She had just told me she did research for a pharmaceutical
company that worked on drugs for deaf people. I had driven a medical
venture capitalist a few days before. They had financed a company
working on an injectable DNA sequence that could allow deaf people
to hear. Of all the Uber drivers driving in Boston, how is it I was see-
ing these two people within a few days. Karma? Destiny? Luck? The
lightbulb went off: I should write a book!
At this Eureka moment, a comic bubble appeared in my head with
the caption, “I’ll write a book, I’ll be rich!” Not so fast, kiddo. On
every project I’ve ever started, I thought because I loved something that
everyone else would too. I started a jazz camp for adults after directing
the Vermont Law School Community Jazz Ensemble for two years. I
thought because I loved jazz and big band that customers would flock
to my camp. I planned five weeks the first year and did two.
I thought a classified ad in Downbeat (a jazz magazine) would
Persistance is required “bring them running!” Four participants signed up. My dad, always
the gambler, loaned me $3,750 to place an ad in The New York Times
travel section. The Times placed it on the wrong page and had to run
it again. I was interviewed, and they wrote an article about the camp. I
finally had twenty participants.
The Jazz Camp has been much like the book—lots of starts and
stops, lots of great ideas that didn’t turn out well. But I kept going. My
sister-in-law talked me out of selling the camp in year seven. I got an
article placed in AARP, and the internet happened, and we were off
and running for thirty-five years.
With my Jazz Camp, I didn’t quit at the first sign of difficulty, and
it’s been the same with this book. I first thought everyone would love
stories written about Uber passengers. Why? Because I was writing
them, and they were interesting to me. Another one of those, “If I love
it, everyone else will too.” Over two hundred agents and publishers
rejected the first version, although I did get some good ideas from a
few of them.
I brought someone in to help me find direction for the book and
I kept bothering him about how we would redo the table of contents.
One of the things I don’t do is research. He pointed me to two articles
about best practices for non-fiction books. From those articles, I learned
how to structure the book in an acceptable way and how to write an
introduction.
Those suggestions forced me into finding a theme for the book that
you have before you now, The Rideshare Diaries: Riders Share Their
Secrets. These stories were always there. I just hadn’t focused on them
in organizing the book. So great, now I had a new template and a new
table of contents and a new organizing theme. I started contacting
agents again.
Two of them sent me back a message: “I like the idea, but the writing
didn’t ‘pull me in.’” So now I had to go back and look at that—the
writing wasn’t good enough. I contacted several friends and rewrote
the introduction. One of my flight students wrote me back, “It’s like
a history book, and the sentences are too long.” I was immediately
depressed, and my heart sunk. He followed up with a suggested reading,
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson. I noticed
in reading that book that the author had some funny twist every few
pages, and so I gave that a try: shorter sentences, and some humorous
references every so often.
Resubmitted. My friend the flight student and avid reader liked it!
“Not a history book anymore, reads more like a novel,” he said. It’s a
light at the end of the tunnel. Is the light green, blinking yellow, strobe
white? Regardless, I had to press forward! That’s what I’m doing now. I
keep moving forward, experimenting, modifying, editing, trying other
things. As with the jazz camp, so it is with this book: I’m not giving up.
The Uber passenger stories in this chapter are tales of persistence.
Matt’s Verta Corporation story is up first. When he went to a career
fair at his college, he went to the first table he saw to “get the nerves
out.” He went back three times that day to impress. He got a call back
for a second interview the next day. Persistence pays off.
There is one other story in this chapter that demonstrates per-
sistence and the results that can come from it. It’s about Uber passenger
Dave Sklowdoska, a project production manager at Gingko Bitotech,
whose motto is, “Sometimes you have to jump through flaming hoops
of bullshit to get what you want.” Persistence: it’s not surprising it’s
important. George H.W. Bush has been known to use the expression,
“Ninety percent of life is just showing up.” We need to add to that,
“repeatedly.” After all, that’s what persistence is: showing up over and
over again.
BYRON’S RULES FOR PERSISTENCE
1. Commit yourself to a goal
2. Keep doing things that will lead you to your goal and keep doing them repeatedly
THE RIDESARE DIARIES
5
Matt—Skyscraper Crane
Maintenance Engineer
“I am 5’5”, 145 pounds, and I’m stocky. I’ve got long brown hair
that’s always in a bun and big blue eyes. My eyes are the first
comment I get from new people, especially women.”1
Rider Lesson #1: Insert yourself into situations
that you desire.
Matt grew up in the Iron Range in Minnesota, the biggest deposit of
iron ore in the world. Virginia, Minnesota was a town of about one
thousand. It was four miles to the nearest store and about a one-hour
drive to Duluth, Minnesota. Matt grew up building stuff and working
on bikes. He was an avid dirt bike rider. At sixteen he started going on
road trips and attended the Somerset Festival in Wisconsin. He fell in
love with the freedom of the road. He spent as much time as he could
making money so he could take trips and go camping. When he was
later offered a job that involved nationwide travel five days a week—not
to mention the chance to work at the top of tall buildings—there was
clearly no other choice.
Matt studied mechanical engineering in college. While he was there,
a custom motorcycle shop opened in Virginia, MN named Malicious
Cycles, and he started frequenting the shop, hanging out, talking to
the owner. He would go on a Monday, return Thursday, show up on
the weekend. Every day he had the chance, he just kept going back,
showing up, offering to help, learning what he could about custom bikes.
In his junior year at Minnesota State University in Mankanto, MN,
he had to do an internship. The University offered him an internship
THE RIDESARE DIARIES
7
Byron Jay Seigal
working on a machine that would automatically “debeak” chickens. Matt
was a gearhead, not a chicken-head. Matt went back to the Malicious
Cycles and talked the owner into allowing him to do his internship
there, building custom bikes and traveling all over with a dyno machine
that measured the performance of motorcycles at speed. (A dyno (or
dynamometer machine) is like a treadmill for cars and motorcycles with
attached electronics.) That became his life—traveling on weekends and
in the summer to motorcycle shows and working with bike owners to
improve performance on their motorcycles. His persistent presence
at Malicious Cycles throughout his junior year made his ask for an
internship a no-brainer for the shop. Persistence at work.
When they were not building custom bikes at the shop or going
to shows, they would take scrap metal and weld them into sculptures.
They brought these “sculptures” to the shows and gave them to motor-
cyclists as trophies for the most improved performance of the bikes at
that show. Matt had become a certified welder in the process. Matt
had inserted himself into the Malicious Cycles biz.
In the spring of his junior year there was a job fair scheduled for
an upcoming weekend. The Minnesota State students and their teach-
ers took the job fair seriously. They practiced at mock interviews and
researched the companies they wanted to interview with. In Matt’s case,
that meant library time looking at Caterpillar, Polaris, and Bobcat, all
manufacturers specializing in mechanical vehicles and engines. The
day of the job fair came.
Matt was nervous, but as he walked into the conference center, an
idea bubbled into his consciousness. “I’ll just go interview with any
company to get the nerves out.” As he entered the door, he turned to
his right to be greeted by a large map of the United States taking up
the entire wall of the display space. “Okay, this looks good, I don’t
know who they are, but a good place to start.” He walked to the table.
This was Verta Corp. He spoke with the company representative,
Dan, who told him that if he worked for them, he would be traveling
five days a week, it would be nationwide, and he would work at the
top of tall buildings. Matt’s eyes went wide as saucers. He left the table
thinking, “That’s the job I want!” He proceeded to talk to his previously
researched companies, Polaris and Caterpillar, but came back to Verta
to talk to Dan again.
After the second visit, he thought, “I’ve got this really cool air engine
back in my dorm room, I want to show it to Dan.” (An air engine is
a reciprocating engine powered by air.) He ran back to the dorm, got
the engine, ran back to the conference hall, and showed it to Dan. Dan
thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Later that day, Matt
went back and helped Dan break down his exhibit.
Matt left the conference hall hoping that Verta Corp. would call
him back. He had done everything he could to not be forgotten. The
next morning, Dan got a call from Verta. They wanted him to come to
Minneapolis to “see how he handles the heights.” The day after, Matt
was on a plane to Minneapolis, and early in the morning he was sent
out with a crew to a seventy-story building. He went up to the roof
with the crew. This building had a crane on it that had an articulating
arm that extended over the edge of the building. The crew strapped
Matt onto the articulating arm of the crane and sent him one hundred
feet out over the edge of the building, seven hundred feet up. (I would
have had a heart attack at that height hanging over the building.)
This crane had two locations that allowed the crane to rotate—one
at its base, and one in the middle. Once the crew had Matt out over the
edge of the building, they rotated the crane from its base three hundred
and sixty degrees to the right, then they rotated it back to center and
three hundred and sixty degrees to the left. They reeled Matt back in.
He described it much like an amusement ride. Matt passed the test.
After the somewhat exciting, somewhat terrifying job interview
for Verta Corp. seventy stories up, Matt accepted the position. He
had returned three times to the Verta table that day and his persistence
paid off. This was a match literally made in heaven—or at least the
heaven Matt experienced seventy stories up. Verta Corporation has
been in the BMU (Building Maintenance Unit) business since 1958.
They maintain the cranes that operate at the tops of skyscrapers all
over the country. Cranes that carry workers on suspended scaffolding
have special requirements. Every crane in this application needs regular
maintenance and must be certified for OSHA (Occupational Safety
and Health Administration) every thirty days. Verta certifies cranes not
only for OSHA but also for insurance as well. Most of the insurance
policies throughout the country are for ten million dollars and in New
York City for twenty million.
At the end of his interview Matt told me that he has photos of all
the views from buildings he has worked on. He told me he wants to
have three pieces of property in his lifetime. He already purchased his
home in Virginia, MN and I interviewed him while he was on vacation
in Idaho looking for a piece of ground that he could develop into a farm.
For his third property, he said he wanted to be someplace in the south
where it’s warmer and the state has “good” gun laws. I asked him why.
Matt, it turns out, was a competitive rifle shooter in high school.
He competed in the three-position and the four-position shooting.
International Rifle events that occur in three positions are conducted
with an equal number of shots fired from the Prone, the Standing, and
the Kneeling positions, always in that order. The four-position compe-
tition adds Sitting. When he was a junior, Matt was the three-position
shooting champion in Minnesota. As a senior, he won in the four-po-
sition competition. He told me, “I just want to be able to go on my
porch and shoot something from there when I retire.”
Matt’s still at it. He’s created an Instagram page documenting all of
his tall building experiences and his travels throughout the U.S. He’s
still inserting himself into situations he desires. His story is proof that
persistence is a key element in manifesting your goals.
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