The Cab Stand

Second Opinion

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Finding a specific address in the pre-dawn hours can be a bitch.   We’ve passed the autumnal equinox, and now the days grow short.

In the dark hours, shadows conceal detail.   Glaring streetlights hide more than they expose.   The headlamps of oncoming vehicles destroy night vision, and colorful things that are vivid and obvious in daylight often blend into the greys and blacks of the wee hours.  Sometimes, for an early morning cab driver, just finding a customer’s home is a challenge.

Most urban areas follow a reasonably predictable pattern of assigning addresses, and it behooves a cab driver to learn his work area well enough to discern approximately where a given address should be.   This isn’t terribly difficult, and any cab driver worth his salt can do it.   Approximately, however, is a different animal than exactly.   And the end game in the process of finding you does, after all, require exactitude.   Two doors down, at 4:45 a.m., doesn’t cut it.

So cab drivers, visual creatures that we are, look desperately for a number on your home.   Seems simple, yes?

No.

Try this the next time you have a moment or two to kill while driving through a residential area:   look for how many different, and often surprising, places people post their house numbers.   We tend to expect house numbers to be somewhere near the front door, and in many cases they are.   This is tradition.   But… in many cases they aren’t.   Over the garage door is a popular place for house numbers, and in a growing number of new homes, house numbers can be found etched in a cornerstone, hidden behind the decorative shrubbery.   House numbers sometimes are not even on the house…  they’re whimsically displayed on signs nailed to trees, planted in front gardens, hung from a lamp post, or painted, fading, on a curb.   And sometimes there are no house numbers at all.

Brass house numbers are the toughest of all in the hours before the sun.   Brass is pretty and delightful during the day, but effectively invisible at night.   Your neighborhood pizza guy fears brass numbers, too.

After you’ve tried my little exercise, try it again.   In the dark.   With no moon.   When it’s raining.   And no house lights shining a welcome.

So…   what we cab drivers do when we’re trying to find you in the dark is pretty simple.   We drive to approximately where you should be, and then begin searching for signs of life.   Specifically, lights.   Cab drivers love people who shine a light at 4:45 a.m.   But all too often, in the rush to get dressed, pack, review email, or sip the morning’s coffee, our clients-in-waiting forget to shine a light.

We cab drivers do not like parking our cabs and wandering on foot, house-to-house, looking for a specific number at 4:45 a.m. because many of your neighbors, understandably, consider this to be a suspicious sort of behavior.   Their trigger fingers get itchy.   The police are sometimes called to investigate.   Their dogs do not take kindly to cab drivers threatening invasions of their territory.

At 4:45 a.m., we cab drivers roll slowly down your street and do our best to avoid sharing space with folks delivering newspapers and with meandering cats.   We do our best not to collide with parked cars or curbside trashcans.   We do not want to molest your mailbox, either.   We’re just looking for signs of life.   Specifically, exactly, signs of your life.

Please shine a light.

Time.

I was going to call this snippet Manufacturer’s Suggested Standard Time. But since the powers that be in the United States, deeming no issues more pressing, have decreed that we now spend seven months each year on Daylight Time, I decided that the title you now see was more appropriate. Daylight Time/Standard Time/All Things Governmental is a separate rant, however.

Here in Cleveland, and specifically in Cleveland’s western suburbs, we are witnessing a growing propensity toward viewing punctuality as a suggestion or an option.   The cab company with which I am affiliated receives several hundred scheduled orders each day, and the appointment times are set by the customers.   It’s become a coin flip as to whether or not a given customer will be prepared to meet the time THEY set. 

When, exactly, did being late, especially for a time that YOU set, become acceptable?  Would someone explain this new standard to me, please?

Because in my world, being late is high on the list of Ways To Be Rude To Your Fellow Man.   Presuming that one can, in fact, tell time, being late is saying to the person on the other end of your appointment “My Time matters. Yours Doesn’t.”

I get up each morning at 2:30 a.m. so that I can roll my cab out of the garage at 4 a.m., ready to meet folks who want to get to work, get to the airport, or get home.   Folks going to work and folks going home are generally ready at, and in many cases before, their scheduled pick-up time.   People going to the airport are, more often than not, late. Sometimes a minute or two late, sometimes five minutes, or eight.  Sometimes even longer.  But late is late.  Late is rude.  And late is theft.

When you’re late for a business appointment ( and mundane as they may seem, taxicabs are a business ) you are flat out robbing another person of their time…   time that could, and often would, be spent productively and profitably.   When you’re late for your cab, you’re robbing the driver of his income-earning time and you’re robbing the cab company of the driver’s services.  You’re robbing folks with appointments scheduled after yours of a reasonable opportunity for their cab to be on time.

Fuck you.  That’s not your right and it’s not your privilege.

Pack the night before.

Get a fancy Mr. Coffee with a timer.

Set your alarm fifteen minutes early.  Or thirty.  Or ask Mom to give you a wake-up call.

Whatever it takes for you to be on time, please do it.

———-

I’ve sat in my cab, parked in various driveways, and watched as late folks:

- re-arranged potted plants;

- took out the garbage;

- held family conferences;

- hugged and kissed goodbye for the thirty-eleventh time;

- chased a cat;

- dressed before an undraped window;

- unpacked ( yeah );

- moved cars about in the driveway and on the street;

- ironed;

- pooped ( yes sir…  your front door was open and so was the door to your downstairs bath…  in perfect alignment with my cab );

- searched for I.D.;

- searched for tickets/boarding passes;

- and ate breakfast,

among other things that I did not especially want to see.   I’m not paid to deal with this nonsense.  

If you do this to me once, you won’t see me or my cab again, because I won’t take your order a second time.  And there’s a good chance that on some freezing pre-dawn morning in January, you’ll have scheduled a cab…  and I’ll be the only cab available.   You won’t see me.   I don’t care if you miss your flight.   You had your chance with me, and you know damned well I do good work.  So you think your time is more important than mine?  It’s not.  You’re just a self-entitled twit, living on Manufacturer’s Suggested Daylight Time.  Fuck you.

I’ll be busy driving someone who’s punctual to the airport…   in a nice, clean, comfortable cab…

…a cab that was there to meet them on time.

I roll my cab out of the garage shortly after four a.m. each morning, and I have a profound love/hate relationship with the hour.   At four a.m. the all-night drunks and the druggies have gone to ground and most of the world’s random reprobates are now hidden away behind their locked doors.   The people of the morning rush are, mostly, still in their beds, or maybe showering, or quietly fondling a lover or spouse. The point men of the rush are sipping coffee from a mug.   I’ll visit each of them in a bit.

For now, though, I’m alone in my cab…  my laptop and my dispatcher’s disembodied voice are my company.   Sometimes I’ll have an order right away so I drive the quiet streets; as often as not, no one wants a cab and its driver at four a.m., so I wait.  Those mornings, when I have only thoughts to occupy me, I loathe four a.m.  Then, the hour proves to me that I’m a fool chasing an arbitrary errand, a mortal creature investing unrecoverable minutes in… nothing.   An order to fill is a better thing at four a.m. 

In October, there’s often a mist or a shallow fog over the Rocky River valley at four a.m.   I sometimes drive my cab into a convenient earthbound cloud, and I don’t want to emerge.   The mist is a comfort, an obvious return to my mother’s womb.   But if I’m driving, there must be an order, someone who does want a cab and its driver.   And so I drive, the mists are left behind, and I tell myself that I’m really not a fool after all.   After all, someone wants me at four a.m.

When I’m driving at four a.m. I’m often entertained by racoons and opossums crossing the streets, returning home, having accomplished a night’s raid.   Cats scamper from yard to yard.   Skunks are about, sometimes seen but always smelled.   Deer will pause in the unlikeliest places and stare at me as I pass.   I think they’re wondering, after we’ve taken everything else from them, after we’ve built houses and offices and stores wherever they try to live, why we won’t at least leave them four a.m.  

There are no dogs to be seen at four a.m. because dogs are sensible creatures.

I’ll pass trash cans at the curb, proud of their owners’ efficiency.   Only the efficient have their refuse at the ready at four a.m.   I’ll pass an upended newspaper rack and wonder how many beers were required to make that idea seem a creative endeavor.   I might even see an abandoned pair of jeans in the road, because at four a.m. the police will not harass a loitering pair of jeans.

Of course, I’m really not alone at four a.m., the world really doesn’t ever stop.   Bakers and nurses and bus drivers and flight attendants from the Vegas red-eye are about.   My fellow cab drivers are prowling, too.   But at four a.m., I feel the most alone, each and every morning.