According to Google, this statement appears on the page https://help.uber.com/en/riders : “Looking for contact information? While we don’t offer a customer service number for Uber riders…” That text is no longer visible on the page, but it was presumably there at one time.

Here’s hoping Uber doesn’t immediately change the number now that I have revealed it.

The human being who eventually reached out to me after my unfortunate experiences¹ was helpful, friendly, courteous and cheerful. She offered to have my individual problem fixed. But what happens if you have an edge case—something beyond the chatbot’s limited repertoire?

There is no way on earth to get a response from the Chatbot (or the App) on the subject “The pinned location is impossible for me to access and the app will not allow me to move the pin.” You can get a fair volume of answer-adjacent gibberish, but no answer.

Left an item in the car? Report the driver? Ask for a refund? Report a missed pickup? The bot can instantly handle all these queries and more from the middle of the bell curve.  There is no choice of “your geolocation makes it impossible for me to use your service.”

The customer service person (!!) said the number is not secret. If you are communicating with a chatbot and ask for the number, the chatbot will cough it up. Question: how would you know to ask?

Is it really secret? Let’s see. Both Google and Claude say the phone number appears nowhere on the Internet.

Of course it appears on the Uber site, Right?

You might expect this page: (1)

Support Resources for Uber Riders

to have a link to this page: (2)

Call Uber now

But (1) does not have a link to (2), at least not obviously. Perhaps if you click on all the unobvious dropdowns on (1), you could find the super-secret number.

If you are lucky enough to stumble across (2) by accident, it is semi-obvious that “Call Premium Support” is the link to click. Aha! I don’t know where you go to get that half hour (hour? two hours?) of your life back.

1. 1 Sad Uber Story,
   
   I Am Not Saying Uber Fired All Of Its Customer Support People ↩︎