She is being taken advantage of, and everybody knows it but her.

Running a carpool can either be fun or miserable. I was very happy to drive my high school sweetheart to school our senior year because they literally lived a 1-minute drive away from me. I got to hang out with them every morning, get angry at the local radio hosts together, and get a little socialized for the day before we had to sit quietly in a classroom for six hours. While I did feel guilty the week I had the flu and was unable to drive them to school, they were able to take the good old, reliable school bus home. If you can’t drive and you mostly rely on other people to get you to and from work and school, you really need to develop an alternate route, especially if they up and decide one day that they don’t want to drive you to work anymore. 

The 18-year-old in this story has a lot of kindness in her heart, but she is obviously getting taken advantage of by her much older coworker who is using her to get free rides to work.