I like my job as a taxi-driver. And I won't be shooed out of it.
“How was your day?” I facetiously asked the trauma nurse as she ducked into the Crown Victoria taxi I was driving. It was actually the end of her night shift, and mine was concluding as well. “We had a trauma,” she said. Another day at the office. Gallows humor riddled with mentions of slippery 20-foot ladders, paralysis fears, lots of blood, a spleen removal. She was wearing the usual scrubs, a bandana over a pair of nice eyebrows which is about the only feature a driver can decipher with the standard Ford rear view mirror at night. The irony was the trauma victim was a dude who fell off a ladder working on the new gargantuan Vassar Hospital site in Poughkeepsie which as seen from Route 9 resembles the Vatican and the new Wembley Stadium combined.
“How was YOUR day?” the nurse fired back, bouncing with energy somehow, laughing. Her laugh made me laugh. “Well, I took some French people to Woodstock,” I said to her. And then it is easy to fall into a Broadway Danny Rose-style listing of the various types who occupied the leatherette she was now sitting upon. A lurching dowager hitting the nighttime AA meeting, Bard College guest lecturers of some import, a middle-aged rural siren who keeps changing her hairstyle and fooled the driver at the train station. It was a well-paced nightshift with enough time for the Buffalo turkey sandwich with popcorn, a few seltzers, some next-day bookings that lingered on the dispatch phone too long.
Pretty typical taxi business on a pre-winter weeknight. I was only driving the trauma nurse because she was traumatized one afternoon when an absent-minded professor type made a left turn in his Prius in front of her SUV as she approached a stoplighted intersection on NY Route 9G. She met the Jaws of Life, her back was messed up, she missed a lot of work and her car was totalled. The professor who hit her was not injured but she said she remembered him sobbing at the accident scene. “He was really crying. I couldn’t believe how much noise he was making,” said the nurse. I admired her swashbuckling spirit and contagious self-confidence. It had been a relatively peaceful Thursday night.
No wedding brawl in front of the Poughkeepsie Grand hotel, no sketchy drug runs from a Red Hook trailer park to Midtown Kingston, no sojourns with Elizaville recluses who believe Bard College is haunted and refuse to go near Annandale but insist on visiting every bank branch in northern Dutchess County. No, most of these Thursday night customers are well-heeled folk with weekend houses along the Hudson and a city downriver full of cancelled meetings and telecommutes and high-end day care centers. Their driveways are landscaped rollercoasters with turnarounds at the half-mile mark and seasoned woodpiles long forgotten along the way when the ash tree was taken down and the weeping willow was pruned last St. Swithin’s Day.
I have been behind the taxi wheel for 10 years now enjoying an honorable occupation that did not have Uber or Lyft competing when I began. The rideshare mega-corporations have tried to crack the rural taxi market, but the long-distances without fares have scared away most of their drivers. The rural area also lacks the population of “gig economy” types who are out of work artists or actors, etc, who are weary of restaurant work and enjoy the freedom provided by the wheel in hand and the accelerator under foot.
Aside from the road, of course, I pay attention to the passengers, not a digital device. I honour convenience, but do not worship it. I remember their stories, their addresses, their driveways, their fallen mailboxes. And when they realize that they don’t seem to mind. And, they don’t have to “rate” my performance after they pay the cash fare and leave my taxi. Nor do I have to rate theirs. It is all so scandalously old-fashioned and free of “data” that I fear someday soon it will be outlawed.
Digital commerce chased me out of newspaper work, and now it is trying to shoo me from the taxi business. Bring it on, I say, catch me if you can. Try to knock me off a 20-foot ladder. I dare you.
