Yesterday, I took an Uber. The weather was beautiful for a 25 min walk, but my friend and I needed to get to the theatre, and so I thought Uber would be faster.

An UberX was “3 minutes” away. We ordered one up. The three minutes passed. Several more minutes passed.

We kept waiting. It said the driver was still “3 minutes” away.

We were running out of time to get to the theatre (a live performance; might not get seated if you’re late).

To our dismay, the Uber app on my iPhone relayed, “Trip Cancelled”. Why would the driver cancel on me!?

Immediately, I ordered another Uber. That one came and we got to our destination, just in the nick of time.

Today, I woke up with a $5 cancellation charge in my email inbox, from Uber.

Imagine my frustration. Insult to injury!

To Uber’s credit, they reversed the charge and gave me a $10 credit.

However, their policy response on Twitter has me scratching my head. Uber reserves the right to charge a cancellation fee to the customer when a driver cancels on the customer!? WTF!? Seriously? How dumb is that?

This is the policy cited by Uber Support in response to me asking why they couldn’t tell the difference between a driver cancellation and a customer cancellation.

By directing me to that policy, they are effectively saying that “if you use our service, and don’t do anything wrong, we may charge you $5 and provide you with aggravation and no service”. It’s like ordering a pizza, waiting for 15 minutes as you think they are making it, and then having the pizza shop cancel your order, and charge you $5 because it was cancelled. Oh, and you don’t get a pizza.

Here’s my conversation with Uber Support.

Clearly, Uber has a really dumb policy on their hands, and/or support staff lacking common sense.