Tag Archives: Couple Of Days

The rest of it, sort of

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Here’s the rest of what’s happened in the cab the last couple of days.

Thursday

  •  Got another call from the South Austin Hospital.  I get there, and there’s this woman there with 5 girls, and a baby in her arms.  It’s about to start raining, so I help them all get in the car and off we go. The eldest of the girls, who can’t be older than 9, hands me a utility bill and says to me in broken English “we’re going here” as she’s pointing to the address.  I start speaking Spanish, and change the radio station to one of the Spanish language stations in town and the mood in the car changes from very somber and nervous to a very relaxed and comfortable mood.  I don’t know how to explain it, but suddenly they all felt more comfortable with riding in the cab and we had a pleasant ride to their home.  I guess they were nervous about the ride, and my speaking Spanish just made them feel better about leaving the hospital.
  • After it started raining, I picked up these hotties from a restaurant downtown.  They were going to a club downtown, so it was a short ride.  On the way over, we start talking and they ask me what’s the best way to catch a cab at 2 a.m. in Austin.  I told them the best way, was to be friends with a cab driver and call him to come get you.  They seem amazed at my answer.
  • I had an interesting conversation with a guy that wanted to be a cab driver.  He wanted to know, just how much he could pimp out his cab.  Could he put 22s on it? Could he put LCD screens in the back of the head rests? Could he put a DVD player, an Xbox, satellite TV, etc.   I dunno where he’s gonna get the money to do all that, but there’s nothing in the contract that says that you can’t do all those things to your cab.
  • I get a dispatch to go pick up some people from Midnight Rodeo, which as you can imagine is a kicker bar.  Anyway, the dispatch said that my customers were being escorted by the police and that the police called for the cab.  Not a good omen.  I get there, and these 4 Irishmen get into the car.  They’re all talking shit to each other, which makes me think that they got into a fight or something.  Turns out, they asked the police officer to call a cab for them since they didn’t know the number.  They were amazed at how everyone must’ve driven home drunk.  They were also surprised that there wasn’t a line of cabs waiting at the bar to pick people up when the bar closed.  Funny.  They were surprised that I knew that they were in town for training, what they were training for and who they worked etc.  I made an educated guess and was right all around.
  • The last folks, were these guys that got dropped off at the wrong hotel, and waited for over an hour for another cab (me) to come back out and take them to the right one.  Dunno why they got out at the wrong hotel in the first place, but what happened happened.

Friday

Was a no show day.  I had, I kid you not, 12 no shows.  People call for cabs, you show up, but there’s no customer there.  That’s a no show.  You’re out money, time and effort.  Anyway, here’s the deal.

  • Dudes came to Austin from New Orleans to party.  Now, does anyone else see something not quite right with that?
  • I took these really scary looking mescans home to the east side.  They were scary looking and I was extremely happy to get them out of the cab.  The last one of them out of the car actually started sticking his hand in through the crease in the back seat, saying he was making sure that he didn’t leave anything behind and then started sticking his paws into the pockets that are on the back of the front seats.  I told him he didn’t put anything in there and to get the fuck out of the car.  He gave me a dirty look, stuck his dirty, stinky paws into the pocket again, and then got out of the car.
  • Oh yeah, earlier in the evening, I drove this really nice couple around while they decided on a place to go.  They finally asked me where I thought they should go.  They wanted someplace to go where they could smoke and have a beer.  I took them to “The Gingerman” and they seemed elated at my choice.

All in all, this was a long night, with a lot of no shows.  Memorial day weekend, is not shaping up to be a winner.

Ah, the cab

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Sometimes, I like driving, other times, not so much. This is the slow time of the year, and so it’s been hard to make any money driving. Couple that with the choking price of gas, and well, there you have it. Well, here are a couple things from the last couple of days:

  • Remember the guy that thought he had had a heart attack a few weeks back? Well, he called again, and I took him on another liquor store run. No heart attack this time though.
  • I ended up talking to this one customer who was telling me about his web company. It’s an outfit called dadlabs.com, which seems like an interesting web site to go visit every so often.
  • I played a cash cab-esque game with some passengers. We were asking each other trivia questions about Central and South America, gasoline prices and other random things.
  • Dispatch sent me out on a pick up from the South Austin hospital. They said that the customer was waiting by the “courdicy” phone. It took me a moment to figure out that dispatch meant the “courtesy” phone. Gotta love it.
  • I think this was on Thursday night. I picked up this guy from a hotel, and on the drive back to his house he shares with me that he broke up with his boyfriend the day before, and had just spent the day and most of the night with a woman. He said that he was going back to women because women aren’t as moody and crazy as men, and “the sex is better with women anyway.”
  • I got called out to a restaurant on a 2 cab call. I hate multiple cab calls from restaurants because usually, the first cab on the scene gets all the passengers, and the last guy there gets nothing. As I pull up to the restaurant, there are 2 people waiting outside.  Turns out, I was the first cab there. Originally, they were each going to different places, but both decided to go to the girl’s house. Anyway, on the way to the girl’s house, she calls her boyfriend to find out if he was home or not. He wasn’t. On the way, I find out that they’ve been working for the last 12 hours and are going home to “blow off some steam.” As we’re pulling up to the house, the guy asks me if I can come by and pick him up in about half an hour. I’m thinking, this was this girl’s Sancho, but what do I know.

That’s it for now, there’s more, but you’ll have to wait for it.

South by South post 1

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South by Southwest music fest is going on right now here in town.  You’d think I’d have a ton of stories to tell of wild and crazy adventures and whatnot.  For the most part, you’d be right.  I’m saving those for the little thing that I’m working on.  Here’s a small sample of what’s been going on these past couple of days.

  • I took the guy from that TV show Angel to dinner at Sullivan’s.  Guess he was in town for the festival or whatever.  I didn’t recognize him at first, but I knew that I’d seen him on TV or a movie or something like that.  Anyway, after he got out of the car is when I remembered who he was.  For what it’s worth, he was very polite and cordial during the ride from his hotel to the restaurant.
  • After taking care of some bidness, these guys flag me down and ask if I can take them about 10 blocks.  I say sure, and they get in.  I didn’t count how many of them they were, but after they got in, I noticed that they had an Irish accent.  I asked “Please tell me that there are only 4 irishmen in this car right now”  They replied, “yes, if there had been more, what would’ve happened?”  I said “Well, we’d have to put the Englishman in the trunk of the car”  They all had a good laugh, and one of them said that that was the best possible answer I could’ve given.
  • I had a couple of memorable quotes, here’s a sample:

“You’re a black man, you can’t do math”  From one black guy to another.

“Seems like Austin is a good place to be a homeless person” Some dumbass I picked up at Nuevo Leon restaurant.

“You’ll spend a hot million on a piece of sh*t house in this town.” Some would be real estate moron.

  • At about 3:30 in the morning, I’m driving down Lamar Blvd heading south approaching 6th street. I see this couple of guys that looked like Borat and his friend from the movie.  I swear to Jeebus, it was a tall, lanky, skinny dude wearing an adidas sweat suit, and a short, stocky hairy dude wearing a jacket and slacks.  They’re practically standing in the middle of the road trying to hail a cab.  I was empty, so I stopped to pick them up.  They wanted to tell me where they were going before they got in, but I told them to get in since I was going to take them anyway.  Turns out, they’re staying at a dorm behind the Scottish Rite dorm on campus. These guys needed to go north, but they were walking west.  On the drive to their dorm, they thank me for picking them up, as they are not from here, and they were very tired and needing to go to sleep.  Turns out, they’re from Berlin and are in town for the festival.
  • There were a couple of people that pissed me off.  The one that has pissed me off the most, was this girl that had no idea where she was going.  Normally, that’s not that bad, but when they blame me for getting lost, that pisses me off.  Seems to me, if you knew where you were going, we wouldn’t be getting lost.  Basically, this chick gets in and tells me she’s going to Stanford drive at the intersection of “On field” and “Windsor”.  I tell her that “Enfield” and “Windsor” run parallel and do not intersect.  She says “yes they do, my friend told me so”.  Anyway, we get out there, and these streets do not intersect at all, like I said.  I kept trying to clarify the name of the street that we’re looking for since I can’t find it on the map.  I ask her “Stanford, like the university, right?” She says yes.  A moment later I ask “Or is it ‘Sanford, like Sanford and Son’?” She says, yes.  A moment later, I ask, “Stand Ford, like stand for a ford?”  She says yes again. “why can’t you find it?”  She ends up calling her friend, and it turns out, the damn street was named “Stamford, like the town in Connecticut.”  Bitch.
  • Early in the day, I picked up a lady that had just flown in from Tokyo.  Later in the day/night, I picked took a guy out to the airport that was flying to Tokyo.  Coincidence, or do I need to go to Tokyo?
  • I had an interesting discussion about whether I thought that Reggeaton music was bigger than Tejano music in Texas.  I told them that I thought that Tejano was bigger, just because of all the mescans, but that I felt that Reggeaton had a wider appeal to all Latinos.  Anyway, that’s all for now.