Update On My Dispute With Lyft

Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver. This is Peter Rosenberger.

This is the nation's number one show for you as a family caregiver, hopeforthecaregiver.com. Let me bring you up to date on a story that happened earlier this year. On January 26th, that was the day that my wife had this huge surgery down in Denver to repair her back, nine hour surgery. And it was a very cold morning, a wintry morning.

Got up that morning, they'd had a breeze and rain throughout the night, turned to snow, and it was bitter cold. I was staying across from the hospital, a little bit down the road there in Denver at the hotel, and I called a ride share. I called Lyft to come pick me up.

I use Lyft a lot when I'm out traveling or speaking or whatever, and I've always had great service with them. So this guy arrives there at five in the morning at the hotel. I have to get there to the hospital early. So he picks me up. It's just, you know, not quite a mile away and I wasn't going to walk at that cold of the morning.

So I'll go out here. He's under the port of cachet of the hotel. I opened the car door and he had not de-iced his car. The trim had frozen onto his car with the big block of ice, evidently, and it pulled the trim off on part of his car. I thought it was just loose.

I really wasn't thinking that much. It was five in the morning. My wife's getting ready to have a nine hour surgery. So I had my mind on other things, but all I did was open the door and I opened the door and this thing came off and the guy came around to look at it. I picked it up, put it in the back of the car. I said, well, you take a look at that a little later, see what happened with it. And I went about my business. He took me over to the emergency room, went through that entrance there to get to pre-op and got with Gracie and sent her off to surgery and was sitting there through the day waiting. And several hours later, I got a text from Lyft.

It said, we're charging you $150 for this incident when you damaged this guy's car. Well, I most certainly did not. And I tried my best. It was a nine hour surgery. So I was sitting there with not much else to do, but fret. So I tried to respond to Lyft and say, no, I didn't do this, explain it and go through their appeals process or whatever.

And to no avail, they shut me down and it was not cool. Well, she came out of surgery. I put that aside, put that in a box of things.

I'll worry about a little bit later. And she was in critical care for, you know, four or five, six days. Got her out of that, put her in a room about two weeks later, we were there for 10 weeks.

And two weeks later I decided, okay, I'm going to solve this problem. Now, you know, if you go out and get a lawyer to do this, I mean, it can be pretty expensive, but I've had Legal Shield now for eight, nine, 10 years. And so I called up the law firm that handles my stuff that's in Montana, where we live. And they said, well, you're in Denver. It happened in Denver.

Why don't we put you in touch with our law firm in Denver, the Legal Shield law firm in Denver? I said, well, okay. So they made the referrals and the folks reached out to be there in Denver. And they said, well, tell us what happened. And I did. And I gave them all the information. I said, what would you like us to do?

And I said, well, I'd like for you to send a letter to their general counsel and say, look, you guys made it almost impossible for me to appeal this. And you took the driver's side of the car and just charged me money. And I didn't do this. And you can look, he was the first driver of the day, I'm sure that was me. And he hadn't cleaned his car properly.

It would have happened to anybody because he didn't properly take care of his car. So the lawyer got all that information and wrote out a letter, sent it to me for me to look at. And I approved it and okay, I will confess.

This is all I asked for. I asked for the return, the $150. And then I tipped the guy two bucks.

It was just a mile. I mean, I tipped him two bucks and I said, I want the two bucks back. Call me petty. But I just wanted the money back on principle.

I thought like the whole thing was just rather uncool. And so they put that in there and then I did have them put in there that I have a rather large radio program and a podcast. And I'll be telling this story until they resolve the issue.

And so they put that in there. They sent the letter on about 10 days later, I got a call, didn't recognize the number, but I answered the phone call. It was legal office of Lyft out in California. And they said, Mr. Rosenberger, we got your letter. We're terribly sorry for the inconvenience. And we're refunding the money back.

The $150 plus the $2. We understand that we dropped the ball and we want to refund this money and make this right. I said, thank you very much. I appreciate that. And we metaphorically or virtually shook hands and parted ways and they did the right thing and I'm grateful for it.

But I had to go to extraordinary measures to get that. I had to have an attorney draft a letter. If I paid an attorney to do this out of my own pocket with going to just an attorney on the street there in Denver that I didn't know anybody, it would have cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars to chase $150, $152 if you count the tip. But with Legal Shield, I pay less than $30 a month.

And that's all I pay for that service and so many more. And I've used Legal Shield for years for all kinds of things. I'm working on them right now with something with a business thing I'm trying to do. I've had them look at contracts. I've had them draft up legal documents, power of attorney, wills, all those kinds of things that are out there. How many things do you go through as a caregiver that you could really use legal counsel on, but you don't think you could afford it? Well, I'm telling you as a caregiver for now in my 36th year and somebody has been with Legal Shield for eight years at least, I have to go back and look at the things, you can afford this.

I don't see how you can afford not to do it because we're going to have terribly complex things that are going to come our way as caregivers. We're going to have these momentary goofy things like what happened with the Lyft ride. And they were going to beat me out of $150, $152 if you count the tip. And that's just not cool. We got enough going on in our life. Do we really want to put ourselves at the mercy of bigger corporations and bigger players that can just weigh us down? They can outlast us. They can outweigh us, outweigh this.

They can just outmaneuver us. I have a very, very injured wife who has a lot of medical problems. I don't have time to take on big corporations that will just beat me out of stuff.

And I'll bet you don't either. Go to caregiverlegal.com. Caregiverlegal.com. That'll take you to my webpage and you look down the left-hand side there where you see these different blocks and you'll see where it says Legal Shield. Highlight it.

It turns purple. Click on it. And then select a plan. It'll say, get a plan. Another menu will come up and say, here's some add-ons because you may need this for your business. Different kinds of things.

If you don't need them, don't select them. And then just add it to your cart. Check out and welcome to the family of having solid legal gear, a law firm for less than 30 bucks a month that you can call on for anything, a traffic ticket, whatever. This is a service that is so extraordinary. And if this sounds like an infomercial, I don't care. I use this. And I'm always looking for things that help family caregivers. And this is a must for you and me.

I mean, I don't know how we can function in today's complex world without good solid legal counsel on so many things. You can do this and it's very easy. If I can do it, you can do it. I just took on one of the largest rideshare companies in the world.

Yeah, it was just for 152 bucks, but I got 152 bucks. How about you? Caregiverlegal.com. Don't wait. Go out there today. Caregiverlegal.com. On the left hand side, just click legal shield and then you'll come up to get a plan. Get your plan.

Sign up and let's go. Let's get you taken care of today so that you can rest a little easier tonight knowing that you've got somebody that's willing to go to extraordinary measures for you. This is Peter Rosenberg. This is hope for the caregiver, hopeforthecaregiver.com. Hey, this is Larry the Cable Guy. You are listening to Hope for the Caregiver with Peter Rosenberg.

And if you're not listening to it, you're a communist. Get er done. Hey, this is Peter Rosenberg. Did you know that you can recycle used prosthetic limbs? No kidding. We've been doing this at Standing with Hope since 2005.

For six years, I did it myself out of our garage and sometimes on colder nights, I'd sit by the fire in our den and I'd be surrounded by a bunch of prosthetic legs that have come from all over the country and I would disassemble them and store the feet, the pylons, the knees, the adapters, the screws, all those things that can be re-salvaged and repurposed to build a custom fit leg. Then a wonderful organization in Nashville partnered with us to help take it out of my garage and my den and into a better system. This is CoreCivic, CoreCivic.com. Now they are the nation's largest owner of partnership, correctional detention and residential reentry facilities. And they have a lot of faith-based programs. And I'm proud to say that Standing with Hope is one of those programs and has been now for over a decade.

Inmates volunteer to help us disassemble those used prosthetic limbs. Reports show that inmates who go through faith-based programs are better equipped to go back into society. And the recidivism rate of returning back to prison is so low.

They don't want to come back and society doesn't want them to come back. And faith-based programs are a big part of that. And that's something that CoreCivic really believes in. And we are so thrilled that Standing with Hope is one of those programs. I remember the first time we started, the inmate looked at me, he said, I've never done anything positive with my hands until I started doing this program with Standing with Hope. Another inmate told me, he said, I never even thought of people with disabilities until I started doing this.

And it's an extraordinary partnership and very moving to see this. See, we can do so much with these materials, but a lot of family members have a loved one that passes away. They don't know what to do with the limb. They'll keep it in a closet or sometimes even worse, they'll throw it away. Please don't let that happen. Please send it to us through Standing with Hope, standingwithhope.com slash recycle, standingwithhope.com slash recycle. And let's give the gift that keeps on walking.