yellowandblackmail

So over a year ago, this girl was in my cab on an account for school. She had just returned from a vacation in Mexico, and all she had to tip me was 100 pesos, in a bill. I didn’t expect her to tip at all considering she was on an account, and people riding on an account that isn’t their own tend to not tip.

I carry this 100 peso bill in my wallet for several months, and learn that one of my friends makes yearly trips to Mexico in the summers. I gave her the bill (it’s about $10 US) and told her she’d find more use with it than I ever would.

Yesterday I see her again, she’s beaming because she’s just returned from spending that money in Mexico. She tells me that when she got there, it was randomly “El Dias de Taxistas”… TAXI DRIVER DAY! Apparently the taxi drivers of the city had decked out and decorated all their cabs and the whole city was very noisy from them honking their horns in celebration. She said she spent the money that day. She also said she bought me a poster from the celebration and sent it to the US in a tube thingie, but it hadn’t arrived. She thinks it was lost.  ;(

But what the hell! That peso bill started in my cab and ended in a celebration of cabs! WAHOO!

Last week I was on my way to pick up 3 college kids from their parent’s house (I’m assuming) and take them to their apartment down town (also an assumption, but that’s what it looked like). On the way to them I saw what I thought was a large bag of trash in the center divider of a major street. It’s a grassy area, large with no dip in ground level. As I pull past, it moves and I realize it’s a person. I think “that’s a strange place for a homeless man to sleep.” And then I go pick up the kids. It’s not uncommon for homeless men to sleep in sleeping bags all over the city and especially under the Monona Terrace, but I hadn’t seen one at this particular intersection before.

Then I think “maybe that guy wasn’t sleeping, maybe he’s hurt,” as I wait for the kids to come out. When they pile into my car, I ask them if we can make a small detour and I tell them about the man I saw. “Ya, okay, we’re in no hurry.” I don’t turn the meter on, and don’t plan to until past the intersection of where I saw the man.

We see him again and I pull up alongside him. I hope a car hadn’t hit him or something because I REALLY don’t like seeing blood and gore. I ask the man if he’s okay and he starts rocking himself back and forth and wailing. I call 9-1-1 and get them to come out. They ask me things like “Does he have a history of heart problems?” And I try to explain to this person I’ve never met this man in my life and he’s in no position to tell me his medical history. The person on the phone asked me if the man was turning blue, and I say “I can’t tell, he’s a black man and it’s dark outside.” And it isn’t like I know what his normal pallor is.

The injured guy is wailing for us to ring his doorbell and tell his girlfriend he’s out here, so the three boys in my car go do that, but there’s no answer. It looked like he was at the shopping center on one side of the street and was on his way across the street to his apartment, but he said he just went numb and he couldn’t feel his left leg. A doctor pulled over before the ambulance got to the scene, so I just felt a lot of concern and not panic anymore.

The thing that pissed me off was that between the two times I saw this man (the second being me pulling over), no one else pulled over to see what was up. The three boys in my cab were concerned about this, too. After I pulled over, I think more people pulled to the side of the road and got on their cell phones, probably because they thought I hit the guy in my big yellow taxi. I feel bad for not pulling over the first time I saw him, but not REALLY bad. I did come back for him once it sunk in that he could be in trouble. It’s alarming to see people with the strong mind set of “I don’t want to get involved.”

Another story from last night:

I picked up two ladies from the Jail downtown  they were going to the near-east side. They were leaning up against the building, casual and comfortable, and when they got in they started talking about how AAA is lame and about their lack of good customer service while they tried to get their brown van towed. As they got in and I pulled away with them, a cop car decided to throw on it’s cop lights and blow a red. I thought that was a terrible abuse of power.

La La La, nice ride while the ladies chit chat in the back. I think vaguely that it’s nice to listen to black women talking sometimes, when they have smoky, soothing voices and a core of confidence but speaking softly at the same time. They’re talking about how they’ve had bad experiences with AAA and with a competitor taxi service and other random stuff.

I pull onto their street and we’re within a block of their apartment. There’s a cop pulled over to the right with it’s lights going. I think maybe that they’ve just finished giving someone a ticket and that person drove off because it’s in a typical place for a speed trap. As I get closer to the cop car, there’s two civilian cars in front of me. The front most car stops and a man gets out of the driver’s seat. He’s got a gun holster on, and a fanny pack I think. I don’t notice these at first, because when he gets out I think something is wrong and that someone has hit an animal or child or something. I do notice these things when he opens my passenger door behind me.

“Step out of the car please, police,” he says, and the woman cop who is actually DRESSED like a cop from the stopped cop car is on the other side of my cab doing the same thing to the other lady. I am just so surprised I cannot think of what to say or do. By the time the two cops got the two ladies out of the car (who didn’t put up any resistance and were also surprised), a second civilian-looking car pulls up behind me and another man comes to my window.

“What was the fare?” He asks. “um… $8.50…” He gives me a ten and says, “Have a good day!”

People came down and abducted my passengers.

I felt like a fish out of water, with it’s mouth slowly closing and opening trying to catch my breath. I have no choice really, I have to drive away and never know why these people weren’t just detained at the freaking jail where I picked them up. It’s kind of obvious now that the cop that ran the red in the beginning was speeding up to meet us at our destination and the two civilian cars were following us the whole time. Does this mean they didn’t pull us over like you see on TV because they thought my passengers were armed and they wanted it to be a big surprise?

Madison feels like a small town.  Last night I went to the bar with a few co-workers. One bought me a beer because I was kinda low on dough. The band that was playing had another co-worker as the lead singer. There were several familiar faces, but I only knew a few by name… and Lauren. Two weeks ago Lauren was getting a cab ride home from me and her credit card was declined. She was a regular rider so I bit it and just paid for it myself. I held onto her driver’s license so she would come into the office and pay me back, but she never did. I found out she’s been doing the same thing to a couple other drivers. I was unsure if they had gotten collateral from her… not that it helped.

I say “HI!!! I want you to come meet some of my friends!” She was a little confused. I brought her to my co-workers “You owe me money!” I say with a smile. She stammered and I explained that I was one of her taxi drivers. She said that she was sorry she hadn’t got to the office to pay me, but her grandfather had died.

She tried to say she didn’t have the money, and I said “That’s what you said in my cab.” I held out my hand, “Eight Dollars.” She fumbled a little, gave me a ten, and said sorry. I let her know I would deliver her license to her mailbox soon, but she said she’d just go into the office and get it herself. I’m pretty sure she won’t and that she ordered one already from the DMV. I called the office this morning to let them know she paid up and not to withhold her license if she did come in to claim it.

“Asshole Tax” is one of the terms used by the drivers in my company (mostly by night drivers). It’s part of our vocabulary, but not on-the-record. It basically means this: If you’re an asshole to your cab driver, do not expect them to call attention to the fact you’ve left something behind in the cab (like phone, camera, extra money) or that you have overpaid them. This is the tax they charge for you being a douchebag. Depending on the severity of the assholery and the mood of the driver, this could either mean that you’ve lost your camera/money/cell phone forever, or you just have to drive YOURSELF to our office to pick the item up. The driver will NOT spend extra time to take it to you if you recall forgetting it later that night.

Now, this does require some evil on the part of the driver. It’s really easy to get jaded enough to become this evil, because generally customers that are drunk at night forget their manners… and eventually it adds up.

Here’s a previous story of when I got to collect asshole tax:

I had 4 passengers in my taxi, all completely wasted: two couples. I picked them up at the Nitty Gritty, where one of the passengers had gotten themselves kicked out for being too obnoxious. Their destination was a hotel across town. Along the way, the guy in the front seat mentioned he was so drunk he couldn’t see ANYTHING, and that he blew about $500 at the bar (which is really hard to do in Wisconsin, generally, because booze is SO CHEAP). The two girls in the back expressed feelings of nausea, so I pulled over once to help them out, but they didn’t produce anything.  I figured since they had the opportunity and nothing happened, they’d be fine until they got to their hotel.

A little farther down the road… One of the boys mentions that he’d like to go to the Perkins (Denny’s, basically) instead of their hotel across the street. The other boy starts talking about all the different greasy foods he wants to eat which sets off one girl vomiting. I’m in the middle of a 6 lane road. She’s trying to get it out of the window, but there’s her friend between her and it. Then the second girl… she starts to vomit, too. They both refuse to get out of the car, but both continue to stick their heads out of the same window, getting only half the puke out of the car.

I mentioned the $50 clean up fee the first time we stopped for this, and the boys seemed fine with paying it… as long as I still took them all to Perkins. These boys are forcing their sick girlfriends to still go to Perkins, and they’ve been loud and obnoxious to me the whole ride.

Once we get to Perkin’s, the guy in the back starts to pay the $23 on the meter.  I remind the guy in the front about the $50 cleaning fee (which actually doesn’t get doubled if you have two people vomit). So i get $21 from the guy behind me… and the guy in the front hands me these bills: $10, $20, $100, $10. He thinks it’s $50, not realizing there’s that extra 0 in there. I fan it, notice it, close up the money and say “That’ll be $2 more please” without batting an eye.
This is pure evil, and I know this, but I did it anyway and it paid for my groceries that week which I was hungry for. Besides, when the dude was fishing out his money to pay me this, he had at least 4 other $100 bills in there. He doesn’t need it nearly as much as I do.

This story happened last night, and it’s not nearly as epic:

Guy gets in my cab on the west side. He hands me $20 which i put in my visor in plain view for the whole ride. He asks me personal questions the entire ride, I refuse to answer half of them.  He gets offended I didn’t let him sit in front, and he is a general misogynist jerk the whole way. He’s totally trashed and mentions the mafia and how much money he and his business make.

When I finally get him home (not the way he told me to go, but my own way), he gave me $20, and then gave me another $20 and said he’d need $16 back. The meter was at $19, so he was thinking he was giving me a $5 tip. He completely forgot about the $20 he handed me at the beginning of the ride, and I was not inclined to remind him. Normally, when someone tips me nicely or is just nice, I will remind them, and I’ve done so countless times in the past… But this time I just didn’t feel like it. The guy was a douche, and I am poor with little patience. Summers are slow. I needed this break badly, and I took it.

I’ve joined the dark side, and I’m 99% unrepentant. I’ll redeem myself later by an act of kindness to someone who actually deserves it.