Call Yourself a Taxi Company?

I've been reading the Irish Taxi blog for a couple of months now. It's a blog written by a taxi driver who works nights in Dublin and he updates his blog with interesting stories about his fares and other more general news. It's a good read in its own right but it's also brought back memories of my own time as a base controller, also working nights, in a taxi company in Dublin.

Working in the taxi business, especially at night, is certainly a good job if you like telling interesting anecdotes about what happened you in work the other night. Every week will bring its own honour roll of passengers who meet and exceed your expectations of them to sit in your car and be ferried from location to destination. Often you will remember them for some interesting thing they told you in conversation. Sometimes its some extreme act of stupidity. (On their behalf. It's your anecdote.) Now and again its because they were really, really nice.

Being a taxi driver is also a dangerous job and I had a personal rule from my days as a base controller that if a person was too drunk, obnoxious or aggressive to conduct a civilised phone conversation then they probably wouldn't make very good passengers to have sitting beside you in a car either. In a way I miss the late night arguments over the phone with drunk or high strangers shouting abuse or talking rubbish at me.

A regular call was the call from someone who had lost their wallet/phone/keys in a taxi and were phoning up to see if anyone had handed them in. It wouldn't take long for them to admit that they didn't remember anything about the taxi or the driver, except maybe the car was blue or the driver was called Eddie. They usually wouldn't know if the driver worked with a taxi company at all or if he was independent and would be just ringing up at random in blind hope. Often they wouldn't be even sure if they had lost it in the taxi or somewhere else.

On a couple of occasions they would be lucky and I would be able to recognise the driver they were talking about from their description and the driver would have found what they were looking for but there were hundreds of drivers in our company and thousands of others who didn't belong to any company and phoning up looking for a lost phone or wallet was a complete shot in the dark.

I remember one call where the customer were really taking a shot in the dark and when I told him that nothing had been handed in he asked for a drivers phone number to see him if he had found anything.

"What driver?" I asked.
"Any driver. I just want to ask him if he found it."
"There are thousands of taxi drivers in Dublin. What's the point of ringing one at random?"
"I just want to try. Just in case."

When I told him that we couldn't give out drivers private phone numbers and that it would have been a waste of time anyway it was almost as if I had told the fella that it was my wallet now and I was keeping it.

Since by law lost property is supposed to be handed into the Carraige Office anyway unless the driver is able to return it himself we would usually just give them the carraige office phone number. From personal experience I knew that getting someone to even answer the phone in the carraige office could be tricky enough but that was another problem.

This came back to me this morning when I was browsing through Irish Taxi and I spotted a link to Dublin Taxi, another blog by another taxi driver working nights in Dublin. From Dublin Taxi's blogroll I followed another link to Blank Top Chronicles which is a blog written from the point of view of the guy in the base room taking the bookings and talking to customers on the phone. This is closer to my experiences and it was great to read the conversations. I often thought that I was the only one who had these conversations which often ended with the immortal lines "call yourself a taxi company?" so it was great to read about someone else going through what I went through. This guy lives and works in Virginia but the conversations with one or two cultural differences could have happened anywhere in the world.

From The Blank Top Chronicles:

"ME: Blank Top, your phone number please?
GUY: Yeah, I took a cab over the weekend and I think I dropped a $100 bill in it, did anybody turn it in?
ME: Did you get the cab number?
GUY: No.
ME: Where did he pick you up from and take you to?
GUY: It was between two bars in Clarendon, I don't really remember.
ME: Let me put you on with lost and found, they might have it.

"So I transfer him. A few minutes later. . .

"ME: Blank Top, your phone number please?
GUY: Yeah, I just talked to you about losing a $100 bill?
ME: Yeah?
GUY: Well your lost and found people said they didn't have it, is there any way you can call your drivers on the radio and ask?
ME: Do you know what company this cab you took was from?
GUY: You know, I'm not really sure.
ME: So then you're basically just calling every company in the phone book asking if anybody found a $100 bill over the weekend.
GUY: Uh, you know, come to think of it, it might have been a $50.
ME: Oh. No, the only thing anybody turned in was a $20 dollar bill.
GUY: Yeah yeah, that was mine.
ME: Okay, great! I'll just need you to confirm to me the serial number.
GUY: Huh?
ME: The serial number on the bill. I mean, you didn't know the cab company you were using, you didn't know the cab number, you didn't know the denomination. For all I know you might be some asshole calling every cab company in the book fishing for a few bucks.
GUY: No, it was definitely a twenty, that's gotta be mine.
ME: Again, I'd just need you to confirm the serial number.
GUY: Who knows the serial number on their bills? I just know it was a twenty.
ME: Do you know what president is on the front?
GUY: Uhhhhhh. . . . shit, it's, um. . . . .
ME: YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME! You don't even know what president is on the $20 dollar bill?!
GUY: Man, it's my fucking money asshole, you need to give it back!
ME: Hey, I would if I could, but you can't even identify the cab company, cab number, denomination of the note, serial number, or who's picture is on the front. Put yourself in my shoes: what do you do?
GUY: Uhhhh. . . . Give it back?
ME: Oh, I'm sorry, the answer we were looking for was "keep it". Keep it.
GUY: OH NOW YOUR FUCKING KEEPING IT HUH?
ME: Yeah, that's right. What do you think I should spend it on?
GUY: You got no right to keep that man!
ME: Maybe you're right. Should I give it to charity?
GUY: YOU SHOULD GIVE IT TO ME!
ME: I'll tell you what: How about I just burn it? Then we have nothing to argue about.
GUY: YOU CAN'T BURN IT!!!
ME: Yeah, that seems to be the best thing to do here. (I take my cigarette lighter out of my pocket and flick it next to the phone) Whoa, there we go! Man, these fucking things burn fast. . . . OW! Singed my finger a little there. . . Okay, the bill is gone and we have nothing left to discuss. But hey, while I've got you on the phone, would you like to take a customer satisfaction survey?
GUY: FUCK YOU! (slams phone down)

"For those of you who haven't figured it out yet, no $20 bills were harmed in the filming of this episode, no one actually turned one in.

"Oh, and we have a 'Conversations ending by the caller yelling Fuck You then hanging up' trifecta in play."