Picture it: Christmas Eve, about 7:30pm. 29 degrees outside. I worked all day (and before you start feeling sorry for me because of that, let me just say that I had an awesome day at work! All my favorite people were there, and it was all fun, fellowship, and finger-food!) Went grocery shopping after work to get what I need to make Christmas dinner. Don’t have a car, so I headed home by way of a bus and a train…and unfortunately, I didn’t quite make the last bus that I needed. Called the house, and nobody was home who had a car to come get me, and I wasn’t eager to wait another hour for the next bus, so I called a cab. I got paid today; I could afford it. Besides, it’s Christmas Eve.
Cabbie showed up very promptly at the train station. He was a little brusque, but again – it’s Christmas Eve, and it’s cold, and I’m sure everybody would rather be home. So we get to my house, and that’s when I realize I’m out of cash. I gave my last nine bucks to a very nice homeless man at the first train station. (Call me naïve or whatever, but you know what? I’ve been there. If nine bucks will help him get a warm place to sleep, then yay. Nobody should be sleeping outside on a night like this.) So anyway, I have no cash, so I pull out my debit card, and the cabbie won’t take it.
This is a first for me; I’ve never had a problem with cab drivers being able to process a credit card. But okay – I went in the house to see if anyone had cash. Except now there’s nobody home. So I muttered a bit to myself, found my checkbook, and went back outside to offer the cabbie a choice: my debit card or a check.
(I feel I should mention here that there was a credit card reader attached to his meter. So I didn’t, and still don’t, see what the problem was.)
Well. All the frustrations that this poor cab driver had been building up all day (and possibly for the last several days) got unloaded on me. He cussed me out, took my card, took my ID, threw them both around a bit, imprinted my card manually, threw the imprinter on the floor, cussed me out some more, then slid my card through the aforementioned card reader… “Why you didn’t take the bus? This is why we hate the people who call from the train station…” on and on, ad nauseum.
Meanwhile, I’m standing at the driver’s-side window, in the cold, trying to apologize - explain - whatever. Finally, I just gave up and realized that at least his tirade was saving me the extra 25% that I would’ve tipped him otherwise.
Once I got inside my nice warm house and shut the door, I had a few choice words to say about the whole episode. But even then, I only said one of them.
Now however, I think it would be a fitting time to print the list that “Jonathan” was asking about today at work: the so-called “kill list.” The list he was talking about was the one I made a few days ago, when I finally left work, after spending all day on a sisyphian project. That list included:
- Lauren
- Ronnie
- Laura
- anybody who had anything to do with the buying, selling, or processing of the picture frames that I was unsuccessfully trying to organize.
Tonight’s list has just one entry:
- f-ing asshole cabdrivers!!!
But since, as I keep pointing out, it is Christmas Eve, I feel the need to balance that list out with another list.
My Favorite People of the Week:
- Angela
- Jessica
- Michael
- Chanse
- Dona
(To my boyfriend: You’re always on that list. You are a permanent fixture, right above #1. This is a list of people here, that I’ve interacted with recently, in the course of my day-to-day existence… Okay, no way that I try to explain it sounds adequate. I love you. You transcend the list. How ‘bout that?)
No comments:
Post a Comment