Uber Is Putting a Bop-It In The Backseat In An Effort To Distract Drunk Passengers

Let’s give a round of applause to the real MVPs of weekend nights: Uber drivers who have to deal with drunk assholes. Particularly drunk assholes who beat them up and then, incredibly, sue the driver for $5 million, claiming that the assault was illegally recorded. (Looking at you, former Taco Bell executive Ben Golden. You suck.)

Uber can’t just stop giving rides to these people—they’d lose a massive chunk of their business. Hopefully, though, the company’s new plan to prevent crimes like Golden’s by distracting inebriated passengers will work. According to The Guardian, the ride-sharing giant is piloting a new program in Charlotte, N.C., that places a Bop-It toy in the backseat of each car.

Yes, Bop-It, that icon of the ‘90s, probably second only to Furby in obnoxious noises of the decade. But there’s no denying that it could be mesmerizing, particularly to wasted folks who have mentally regressed to a childlike state by the time they get in the car—even moreso to nostalgic kids of the ‘90s. “An intoxicated rider who is engaged in something interesting is less likely to be irritable and aiming aggression at the driver,” Joe Sullivan, Uber’s chief security officer, told The Guardian.

There’s a chance that this might work, we think. But we can also picture this going wrong in so many different ways. You see, Bop-It picks up the pace fairly rapidly, and for players with diminished motor skills, it would be a Sisyphean challenge to keep the toy going for more than 10 seconds at a time. That could lead to lots of frustration and lots of broken Bop-Its.

Our lovely news editor Jim Vorel has an even sunnier hot take: “This will just end in drivers getting beaten on the head with Bop-Its.” They do sort of look like clubs, actually…yeesh. Maybe Furbies would have been a better option.