The Cab Stand

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Does This Really Have to be Difficult?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.