Work · fiction
I work too much and don't see my children
A story about a ride-hailing driver who works fourteen hours a day and, on a late-night ride, picks up a passenger who shows him the road back.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
Fourteen hours a day, six days a week. He did the sums at traffic lights.
The car was rented. The rent was due every Monday. Gas went up every two weeks. The app kept a share of every ride, and what was left paid for the two children's school, his mother's medicine, the installment on the refrigerator and almost nothing else. To close the month, he had to drive. To drive, he had to leave home at five, before the children woke, and come back at midnight, after they were asleep.
He was thirty-nine and saw his children sleeping. Only sleeping.
His daughter was seven and left drawings on the kitchen table, for him to see when he got home. His son was eleven and no longer left anything.
One Thursday, around three in the morning, the app rang with a long ride, to the airport. He accepted. It was good money.
The passenger was a man of about seventy, in a rumpled suit, with a small suitcase. He sat in the back and was quiet for a while. Then he asked:
"Do you have children?"
"Two."
"And do you see them?"
The driver looked in the rearview mirror. The old man was looking out, at the city lights going by.
"I see them sleeping."
The old man nodded, slowly, like someone recognizing a sentence he once said himself.
"I used to see mine sleeping too. Thirty years. I built a big company. I traveled the world. I'm on my way now to my granddaughter's wedding, on the other side of the ocean. She invited me out of politeness. She doesn't know me."
The driver didn't answer. The road to the airport was empty, a strip of dark asphalt between yellow streetlights, and the car seemed to drive itself.
And that's when the road folded.
He saw the same road twenty years before, when he was nineteen and left the countryside with a backpack, to work in the big city. He saw his mother waving at the bus station. He saw his father, who also worked fourteen hours a day at a factory, and whom he almost never saw awake. He saw that he had sworn, at that bus station, that with his own children it would be different.
He saw the road twenty years ahead. Himself, at sixty, in the back seat of a car, in a suit, on his way to the wedding of a granddaughter who didn't know him.
And he saw the third road. Narrower, dirt, with brush on either side. Him driving, slowly, and in the back seat his two children, laughing at something. He didn't know where they were going. It didn't matter.
When they reached the airport, the old man paid for the ride and left a big tip.
"It's not for the ride," he said. "It's for what I didn't do. You do it."
And he went into the terminal.
The driver sat at the curb for a long time, engine running.
He didn't quit the app. He couldn't. The bills were still there. But, that week, he did a small thing. He turned off his phone for the whole of Sunday morning, something he hadn't done in two years. He woke the children with bread and coffee. He took them both bike riding in a square near home.
The eleven-year-old, who no longer left anything on the table, rode beside him the whole time and told him everything that had happened at school since the start of the year.
On Monday, when he got home at midnight, there were two drawings on the kitchen table. One from his daughter. One from his son.
In Bairo's story, the road leaves a lesson: technology without people is just code. Read: The coin and the road.
The way forward
When you can't work less, you can protect a piece of time that belongs only to your children, with the phone off. They won't remember the hours you worked; they'll remember the mornings you were fully there. Start with one morning a week.