Fifty-one, laid off, and looking at the driver app.

At 51, I added rideshare driver to the résumé. Corporate layoffs had opened a hole in the income, and the bills had no interest in waiting for the next chapter. I had a car, a town I knew, and some hours between family commitments. Driving was a practical answer.

I grew up in Wilmington. That helps with the roads. It does less for the question I kept coming back to after going online: am I making good use of the time I actually have? There’s the ride, the trip to the pickup, the gap before the next one, and the place I end up when I need to stop.

My business background made me impatient for a clear report. I wanted total working hours beside ride hours. Tips on their own line. Bonuses on another. I wanted to compare parts of the day without giving a lucky tip credit for an entire business strategy. That did not seem like an unreasonable amount to ask of a technology company.

I even formed an LLC for the driving. It made the mismatch more noticeable to me: I was setting up a small business, but most of its controls lived in somebody else’s app. Uber and Lyft have their own priorities. I have a family pickup to make and a limited number of hours to earn. Sometimes those priorities line up. I want to understand when they don’t.

I’m using AI to help me work through those business questions. The reporting starts with driver records and a shift log, with the goal of producing a report I can actually check. AI cannot recover working hours that nobody recorded, however convincing the finished report looks.

The family had already given me a scheduling problem worth taking seriously. Music gave me a more enjoyable idea: a radio app built around artists coming to Wilmington. Bagsy is the software brand behind those projects, and I’m a Bagsy co-founder. Here, my interest is what the tools can do for a real afternoon, a driving shift, or a car full of people.

That is why this page exists. I’m driving, doing the arithmetic, and sharing what I’m learning about the tools along the way. Some posts will be about the marketplace. Some will be about getting everyone to practice. And some will be about a song, because I still want to enjoy the time I spend in the car.