There is one unusual story from a London cab driver. On one fare a passenger leaned over to ask a question and gently tapped him on the shoulder. The driver screamed, lost control of the cab, nearly hit a bus, drove up over the curb and stopped just inches from a large plate window. For a few moments everything was silent in the cab. Then the shaking driver said, “I’m so sorry, but you scared the daylights out of me.” The badly stunned passenger apologized to the driver for startling him. The driver replied, “It’s entirely my fault. Today is my very first day driving a cab. I’ve been driving a hearse for 25 years.”
London England’s cab drivers must pass a notoriously demanding exam before certification. Called the “Knowledge”, this test covers 25,000 streets inside a six-mile radius of central London. It usually takes several years of preparation and a few attempts at the test before passing. Because it was so rigorous and favours such a minor group of applicants, it caught the attention of a neuroscience researcher from the University of London. Research was conducted on cabbies and statistics compared to people from the general population. The results clearly indicated that the cabbies had physically larger areas of the brain for spatial memory. London cabbies have the reputation as being the most talkative of London’s professions. Now they are recognized as one of the niftiest professions too. And I thought at one time that taxi driving would be a great part-time job – no longer as I could never pass a test like that.
My first experience with a taxi was when a teenager. A friend and I were in Pembroke one evening and realized we had no way back to Westmeath – and no money. Being so desperate, we arranged for cab regardless. We had it stop in front of a house on Main Street, asking the driver to hang on for a minute while we went inside to get the fare. We left the cab and broke into a frantic run. I don’t know how long the poor guy waited for his money. Come to think of it, we could have stopped in front of my house or his and get it! If the cabbie didn’t smarten up after that rip-off, he’d never make it.
Belligerent, barely dressed, bashful: Clients come in all types for Jake Whitten in Scarborough. He gets to experience all the characters the city has to offer on a regular basis. Some encounters lead to laughs, some could make you cry and others would turn your stomach. Whitten has been a cab driver since the early 1980s and after years of people suggesting it, he’s compiled his best yarns into a book.
One of his tales, called “Five Bucks Can Sometimes Get You 500,” describes a belligerent passenger who jumped into his cab, or rather fell into it. “He was very drunk and he hadn’t shaved in about a week,” Whitten said. Reaching their destination, the passenger threw some change at him while continuing to hurl four-letter words. “I looked on the seat that he just vacated, and there was five $100 bills he had dropped, so I did the right thing. I put them in my pocket and went home.”
Then there was my cousin Donnie who drove a taxi in Kingston all his working life. Dropping out of school was bad enough but to settle for being a cab driver went against the grain of his family, even his friends. But Dave had a plan: His motto was to work less than his competition but make more money. He did by prudently building a trust with some of his passengers who were regulars. If they could give him a location and a time for their pick-up, he would be there. It began to work like a charm until he didn’t need to respond to random requests. His take-home pay comfortably supported his family, bigger than many of his friends. In the end, I considered him quite clever. In fact I wondered if he was smart enough to become a London cabbie!
Maybe it doesn’t matter a darn if we have a privileged career like a lawyer or a doctor but instead have a unpretentious one that we enjoy and are clever enough to make it ‘work‘ for us.
