Hamilton Uber Nan Shelley Winiana provides a ride with a side of cookies

Hamilton Uber Nan Shelley Winiana is sending her customers off with homemade shortbread. Photo / Danielle Zollickhofer

Hamilton “Uber Nan” Shelley Winiana doesn’t just get people from A to B, she sends them off with homemade shortbread.

Winiana 70, has been an Uber Driver for five years, clocking up more than 27,700 trips and tonnes of five-star ratings - most of them for her homemade treats.

Giving away two pieces of shortbread after a ride started as a first-week gimmick.

“I thought I would have the same customers, but the next week I found I had different customers so I just carried it on.

“After a while, it became so popular, I thought ‘I can’t really stop now, because I’m getting very high rated’. If you look through my ratings, it’s all about the shortbread.”

Winiana works six days a week, accepting about 24 rides a day. She spends her day off doing baking.

“I usually make five trays. The recipe is out of the Edmonds cookbook, the only thing I add is custard powder. Although a lot of young men [I pick up] ask me if I could put weed in it.”

Winiana started ubering after she retired from being an office manager for a Hamilton engineering company.

“I needed something to do, I just got very bored at home.

“One of my friends went to an introduction [from Uber] and he said to me afterwards ‘You should become an Uber driver, you’d be great at it.’”

She signed up immediately and hasn’t looked back.

Winiana is a grandmother of 11, plus around 20,000 Uber passengers who she connected with and said "adopted" her. Photo / Danielle Zollickhofer

“I love it. I just love the people I meet every day ... and I enjoy driving, so why not combine the two.”

Her customers range from students to celebrities.

“I picked up ... Teeks, he is a singer ... and a couple of All Blacks, but don’t ask me to name them. I think one of them was Dane Coles.”

Winiana’s daily encounters inspired her to start taking notes for a potential book.

“I’d call it ‘Memoirs of an Uber Driver’. I meet so many interesting people.

She recalled picking up a young man to take him to the nightclubs. He worked as a zoologist.

“He told me ‘I look after the little Blue Penguins. They are the stupidest creatures ... every day at least 10 planes fly over [the zoo] and [the penguins] all look up to the sky and then they fall over on their backs.’ His job is to pick them all up.”

Other memorable passengers included a young couple.

“Both of their [previous] partners had cheated with the other one’s spouse. The [partners that got cheated on] ended up messaging each other all the way through Covid and they ended up together.

“I meet some very inspiring people, too. There was this 76-year-old lady who survived liver cancer. She used to work as a fashion designer in Paris. She was a lovely, lovely lady, really inspiring.”

Winiana’s warm and welcoming personality has even led to customers calling her Uber Nan.

“People get into my car and they say I give off a nice vibe ... they say ‘It’s like getting dropped off by my grandmother’.”

Danielle Zollickhofer is a multimedia journalist based in Hamilton. She joined NZME in 2021 and is writing for the Waikato Herald.

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