I am now working in a more upscale, touristy part of town, but the tourists and the conventioneers haven't arrived yet, so I mostly sit reading a book, or I take naps in the back seat.
This is going to be addressing the wacky owner mainly. As a long-time independent self-employed contractor taxi driver, I am accustomed to a freedom that is severely curtailed here. Generally a taxi company will let us drivers come and go as we please, as long as we pay the rent and don't wreck the cab, but in this particular dysfunctional rinky-dink outfit we are treated more like employees punching a time card; obliged to work until being allowed to go home. and expected to perform duties other than just driving a passenger from 'a' to 'b' such as helping with the upkeep and maintenance of the vehicle, acting as public relations, and human resources operatives, even.
For many months I have put up with this state of affairs. I thought well, at least I am making a living. But there are so many things wrong here. The radio dispatch is a complete disaster. There is a senile elderly lady at the c.b. radio during the busiest part of the evening, and she drives the craziness quotient sky high. It's a scratchy radio where you have to repeat yourself and have a hard time hearing anything she says. All other cab companies have had digital dispatch for decades. None of this shouting "repeat please? say again?". Your calls appear on the dispatch screen and you press either the accept or the reject button. Yes, and that's another thing; we are accustomed to being able to reject a call for whatever reason, whereas here, management calls it "Abandoning a Fare", like it's a capital sin or something.
At first I thought the owner's peculiarity lay in being exceptionally hard-working, but little by little, and it has taking me up until just the other day, when I wrote the owner a letter expressing my frustration, that it dawned on me that the owner suffers from an obsessive disorder. The owner is obsessed with servicing E-E-E-EVERY LAST CALL ON THE PLANET and this is clearly impossible. Some calls are going to get away. I've seen it in the previous cab companies that I have worked for. If there are no cabs available, the dispatcher says to the person requesting a cab that none are available at the time. This is the normal, sane way of doing things.
Last October we had so much rain one day, it was a deluge of biblical proportions. We were navigating oceans of rain, and it happened to get very busy towards evening, when a lot of the drivers went home and there were I think, three of us left. Naturally there was a backlog of calls, and I was thinking to myself I should go home too, because of the dangerous driving conditions. The elderly lady dispatcher was at the controls and she must've blown a gasket, because the owner took over the dispatching. It got so dark and so wet I could hardy discern the outlines of the road, and so was driving extremely slow. At some point I had to stop for gas, and the owner called me on the phone telling me to hurry up, and I said "You are stressing me out. It is not safe to hurry up in this weather". The owner went into a strange tirade about how I was an experienced driver, that I could handle it, and muttered something about 'people who get stressed out', like it was a handicap or a shortcoming.
There was an incident more recently, when a passenger got mad because I was thirteen cents short on his change of a twenty-dollar bill, and after some angry words, he slapped the hat off my head. I sent the owner a text requesting authorization NOT pick up this person again ( because he is somewhat of a regular caller ) and the owner phoned me and quizzed me minutely about the incident. Said I should have given the passenger a dollar back, and that I should be more diplomatic. I got a little hot and raised my voice a notch and said that it would be impossible for me to be diplomatic to somebody who in effect had assaulted me. The conversation was dragging and going nowhere. The owner has a habit of trying to talk circles around you until you give in, but I stood my ground and at long last the owner ok'd my not picking up the offending party anymore.
The cab company boss' favorite words are "fast", "quick", and "expedite", but I'm not having a heart attack just because somebody called for a cab.
A few days later the boss left me a conciliatory message, so I guess I still got the job. For what it's worth.
