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[quote=Anonymous]Don't hold your breath. From Alexander Samul in Detroit:

The first day Bird Scooters hit Detroit, I signed up as a charger and requested Detroit Moped Works to be a “nest” for drop offs after charging. Bird let me know that being 2 miles West of Corktown on Michigan Ave (still pretty visible / safe / close to downtown) was too far out of their target area (lame, right?).
BUT they offered that we could / would be the exclusive repair vendor for these things in the area. They only pay $15 per repair including pick up / work / charge / test ride / drop off; but I figured that it could be a fun promotional thing for the shop, we might learn a bit, and if we did get ALL of this low dollar value work it *may* be worthwhile, so I signed up.

My contact in LA instructs me to just start getting them & fixing them even though I have none of the parts yet and/or bird specific tools. Seems weird, but I go out and grab 5 of the 20+ broken scooters that are out there after the first few days to get my feet wet. 
Without going into unnecessary detail about the repairs; we obviously can’t fix them without the parts. I’m told that my parts are coming in the mail but to drive out to a storage unit off of 94 in Allen Park where I can find a box of tools and parts to get started. This is because they have no local location / business / employees / business license / tax situation /etc. FINE, I drive out in the rain to the unit and open it; IT IS EMPTY. WTF!?!?! My contact in LA says he does not know what happened, so I drive back into the city empty handed and unable to fix these 5 bird scooters that are taking up space in my shop (Imagine if I grabbed all 20+ that I was supposed to!). My contact in LA then tells me to hang tight and he will have someone drop off the parts & tools. 
Fast forward 3 days and a few emails later – it turns that DMW is not the exclusive repair vendor. LA guy signed up 2 other vendors and asked them to visit a different storage unit, get the stuff, and drop it off to me (their competition). They obviously rejected the request; so they now have the tools and parts, I’m stuck with these 5 scooters taking up space that I cannot fix, and the other "mechanics" are at work doing all of the other repairs. Again, my contact did not have the courtesy to tell me this; I had to reach out multiple times to finally find this out. 
Fast forward about 2 weeks of waiting, storing 5 scooters, and missing out on repairs; the parts finally arrive. We do the simple and straight forward repairs, but to release them I need to fully charge them AND test ride them. I can’t do that because Bird did not yet send chargers and the scooters are dead from sitting. 
At this point, I’m done prioritizing this work. Bird is emailing and texting me to get my repairs back out on the streets but can’t be bothered to give me the parts needed to do the (low dollar) work for them. 
2 more weeks of waiting; the chargers FINALLY arrive. I charge the 5 scooters that I’ve had for a month, but they won’t “GO” for me to test ride. I followed the instruction in the few YouTube videos they send for training, so I email LA guy, he says to message “help” through the app. I take time to explain the situation. About 24 hours later they give a useless, generic, bot-like one sentence response. I message again, then about 24 hours later again, I’m told to talk to my “fleet coordinator.” What?!? Who is this?!?! I’ve never heard of this person or had contact with them. (To this day I still have not ever heard from this person.)

At this point in the story, it’s clear that Bird is a not an actual functioning business, so I’m done with them, but for my pride’s sake I’d at least like to successfully complete the work that I accepted before quitting. 
There is NO PHONE NUMBER I CAN CALL and with no answers from LA guy, the help app, or my “fleet coordinator;” I turn to the internet. I join a few “Bird Scooter Charger” Facebook groups, explain my situation, and ask for help. The basic answer from the seemingly educated members / moderators is that I probably did everything right and they are probably broken in a way that they will not function after the standard repairs (which is apparently normal?). Now I need to drive them to the storage unit and get paid only $5 per piece for wasting my time thus far, driving them to the suburbs, and leaving hand written notes about why they are broken. 
I’m still unconvinced that they can actually all be that broken, and honestly think that tech support could enable them remotely OR that I just needed to do 1 minor thing not explained in the short instructional YouTube videos (they were very lacking in detail / out of date / not relevant to all models of scooters).

Whatever… finally I cut my losses. All in all I have invested about 6 weeks of storage, time writing countless un-responded emails & help messages, various trips around town, and hours of online research… oh yeah, and time spent completing the actual repairs too.
IN the end what I got was $25, a really sour opinion of this fake business, and a little chuckle out of how many broken birds were sitting in the storage unit during my second trip there.

It is clear from their business model that Bird does not care about local ordinances and/or giving any tax or licensing revenue to the real cities that they remotely operate in. It is also clear that they do not care about their contractors. 
This really enforces to me that they also don’t care about PEOPLE. These electric scooters are not safe, people ride them irresponsibly, and people are getting injured all over the place with them. Just google “bird scooter injury,” not only will you find articles from across the country about folks getting injured, but you’ll also find multiple personal injury lawyers offering to sue over this, lol.

Anyways, My buddy Andy Didorosi is having his own fun adventures and crusade with these things as you can follow here https://thedetroitbus.com/freebird/ 
One pretty accurate paragraph in his story was reflective of my thoughts on Bird scooters, so I thought I’d use up part of my morning detailing my experience with them as well.

“On the surface, this is good old fashioned Silicon Valley fun: a new product, a low commitment way to try it and venture capital paying for the whole party. It’s great if you’re a well-off person with all of the required bits listed above, but what if you don’t have access to a credit card? Or a drivers license? Or you’re 8. You’re out of luck, bub. Same goes if you want to be a person who makes money charging these things, which they’ll pay you about $6 a piece to pick up, charge, and redeploy back into set spots in the neighborhoods.”[/quote]

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