More than a decade of grousing about product management

Skeevy as fuck – Uber recipe generator

If there’s an unmet need, someone will fill it. A team activity where we bonded over remote lunch delivered by UberEats, searching for the official receipt pointed me at a receipt generator. Use at your own risk.

Ever find yourself after a business trip trying to account for all the cash you spent on stuffing G-Strings? Or to pad your expenses for the IRS if you are a shitheel?

Worry no more, Express Expenses can help! All you have to do is enter in reasonable sounding data, and the cost, and you too can have a legitimate looking expense to file.

I mean, suppose you went to a hostess bar, and dropped $3K buying $800 bottles of Champaign trying to bang the hot babe they hooked you up with, but you can’t use THAT receipt, what is a poor sales-dude supposed to do?

Relax, Express Expenses has your back.

Is it legal? No, not even in the same universe as a legal strategy, but you can’t expect a sales dude to not fudge a bit…

Hell, in their FAQ section, they clearly say that up assume all liability for your actions (fun fact, the Dude’s autocorrect tried to change “actions” to “addictions” … it is like Siri knows me).

Yikes. That is a pretty thin gruel of accountability there!

Then there is the other FAQ, “Do you have SPECIFIC COMPANY receipt?”

Of course not, but there are a few, including for Uber. I guess Uber rides are a common way to pad the ol’ expense account (question: do you not use your corporate card for this? I know that if the Dude used his personal card for a Uber ride (actually Lyft, we are supposed to use Lyft) he would immediately draw the ire of the accounting and audit team on his head).

The Product Angle

While the Dude is horrified that this exists, he can understand the motivation and the “need” this fills. After all, one of the biggest growth markets in the internet era has been the proliferation of pornography, clearly not what DARPA had in mind in the early 1970’s when the germ of the internet was sown.

It is clever that someone popped up to make it trivial to create a receipt, that could be used to – ostensibly – replace a lost receipt. Hell, the Dude has lost more than a few of those crappy thermal printer taxi receipts in his day. But he just sucked it up, and ate that expense, using it as a teaching moment.

In a way, the Dude sees this as brilliant, if misguided and rife for abuse.

Coda

How did the Dude stumble across this?

His team had a quasi team Christmas lunch, and we were all instructed to order Uber Eats to deliver and we all ate and chatted on a video conference. A great idea, but at expense filing time, the Dude realize he didn’t have a physical receipt, or even an electronic one, so he searched “ubereats receipt” to find out how to get a copy, and this web site popped up.

He did find the Uber site, logged in, and grabbed a copy of his actual receipt to submit, but it was not easy to find.

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Written by
pmdude

A crusty veteran from the product management trenches. Plenty of salty language, references to cannabis, and a connoisseur of White Russian cocktails

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Written by pmdude