Everyone Needs A Lyft My Thirty-Day Odyssey as a Lyft Driver

Everyone Needs a Lyft: My Thirty-Day Odyssey as a Lyft Driver is a collection of thirty short stories that are largely conversations between a Lyft driver (Matthew) and his passengers. The stories are mostly verbatim dialogues presented with minimal commentary added to the end of each story chapter. The setting of this ride-share odyssey is the Ypsilanti/Ann Arbor area of southeast Michigan. The stories were assembled from rides provided to Lyft passengers from September 27th to October 27th, 2021. Each original story was captured on the day indicated and presented in chronological order. Pseudonyms are used to disguise the Lyft passengers and the dialogues are carefully edited to protect passenger privacy. Each original story has been written by the author. This book is about how people adapted to life and work during the Covid-19 pandemic. It explains how Lyft rideshare works from a driver's perspective. Finally, it is a book about compassion, change, and serendipity, the natural accidents that make our lives extraordinary and compelling.

Matthew V. Brown, Ph. D., is a retired professor of management and organization. He earned a joint doctorate from the University of Michigan in organizational behavior and higher education in 2005, focusing on complex adaptive systems, retrospective sense-making, and organizational learning. These subjects probably sound like heady stuff, yet my research aim was to study how human work is designed [organized] and how we might improve the work environment and management systems by making them more humane and flexible, not simply technology-driven. Matthew V. Brown currently resides in Ann Arbor, MI, with his wife Mia and daughter, Josephine.