August 27th, 2008
“Son of a bitch, you’re running up the meter!”22 comments
August 20th, 2008
"Hey bro, remember me? You wrote that story about me in the paper."3 comments
August 13th, 2008
“It’s the Californians, man, the Californians are the worst.”14 comments
August 6th, 2008
The middle-aged man I picked up at Vendetta is in a hyperactively verbose lather ...0 comments
July 23rd, 2008
When I step into the obese old woman's apartment5 comments
July 16th, 2008
The obese old woman at Fred Meyer has a bad hip and a wheelchair...8 comments
July 9th, 2008
“...I need to take a shower first and wash all of this blood off.”6 comments
July 2nd, 2008
“So I’ve got these two women in the back of my cab who just refuse to get out...”8 comments
June 25th, 2008
“My friend’s getting divorced, and he’s really drunk,” says the bartender...8 comments
June 18th, 2008
There’s nothing like a good Friday night, and I’m referring to the money.3 comments
[June 4th, 2008]
“What’re you up to?” asks my dispatcher.
“Just living it up out here in Beaverton.”
“You want to pick someone up at the Shell station?” The honest answer is no. Cabbies are skeptical of convenience-store orders for a variety of reasons, and given that it’s 2:30 in the morning on a Saturday, the person at the Shell is probably in for a long wait. If the dispatcher’s bugging me about it, they probably already have been waiting a while, or are stuck in some kind of dire straits.
Whatever. My main concern is scoring some brownie points.
I tell her I’ll take the call, and she replies that she’ll send it over on my screen. The first words that pop up are “GOING TO SALEM,” and my smile could illuminate PGE Park.
I race to the gas station and am greeted by a pissed-off young man. Turns out the woman he met on the dating chat line greeted him at the hotel with a pimp and a request for money. It’s difficult for me to keep from laughing as I tell him that’s the deal with those things, and he’s stupefied by the revelation that strangers on the telephone aren’t really dying to bed him for free.
He wants to smoke, and he spends the whole trip hollering inanities into his cell phone. I’m fine with all of it—as much as the $10 dumbasses drive me crazy, I could cart around the hundred-dollar ones all night.
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RECENT COMMENTS ON ““What’re you up to?” asks my dispatcher.”
Hey NC, it's good that one of the "potential bummer" fares turned out to be lucrative--and good for a laugh, too.
A couple of months ago, in a long and interesting reply...
Thats more like it! I feel ya! I love out of town trips with dumbasses. You can fuck with them wile appearing to be helpful. Cha-ching! Also, thanks for stepping it up.
Sorry that I haven't checked-in in ages, I should probably reply to the angry soccer mom in the old thread, but I doubt she's still checking it.
Anyway, I listen to music that sound...
Thanks, NC, for the info. It turns out that your musical tastes in jazz are very close to my own. And I'm at least marginally aware of lots of the other bands mentioned in your first paragraph. Als...
