Truculence

I was entirely horrible to a chap in my taxi last night.

He was not going very far. He started off by going to one of the other taxis on the rank and was pointed back to me, because I was first turn.  He did not at all like this and huffed and puffed and complained that all of the other taxi drivers were idle and too busy playing on their mobile phones to take him, and so on.

Some people do this. I do not understand why. It is not quite easily obvious on our taxi rank which taxi is first, and so we always point customers in the direction of the car whose turn it is, and some people, for no good reason that I can ever see, get really cross about it.

This chap was one of those. Then he said that he wanted me to take them right down to their boat, at the other end of the marina village. I apologised and said that I couldn’t do this, because the marina village owners have asked that taxis stayed off the site at night. This is because of noise and nuisance, and also they have installed a massive barrier at the gate to make the point.

He huffed and puffed a bit more, and started getting very grumpy, accusing me of not wishing to give a good service. I acknowledge that this is entirely true, I really don’t give a stuff about standards of service, they get in, I take them, they pay, they get out. More than that and I think I would want about an extra ten grand a year. Also I am not a cabaret act, and might remind the world that therapists charge sixty quid an hour for listening to idiots talking.

He got very shirty and started insisting that I took him across the site, and I declined, entirely courteously, as it happened, and then when we got to the barrier he wanted to pay with a card, which again I declined because I only do cash these days. I have no wish whatsoever to pay a three percent charge to the bank for every single transaction, when I can just take cash and keep it all.

Goodness, he was cross about that.

I switched the light on and told him to get out. I said that I did not want his money, and that he was such an unpleasant, miserable, bitter sort of person I did not want anything to do with him. I told him to take his money and get out.

He wouldn’t even do that. He sat in the back arguing that he was a nice chap really, and that he should be allowed to pay.

I said that I didn’t want any money soiled by going through the hands of somebody as bullying and distasteful as himself, and that if he did not get out immediately, he would be accompanying me back to the taxi rank.

He got out, chastened, I hope.

He left the door open. People do this when they are upset, but it does not matter because they are sliding doors, and all I have to do is drive a little way along the road and stand on the brakes and they shut by themselves.

It cost me four quid, but I felt that it was entirely worth it.

In other news, I have got a week to go before I must either hand in my fantasy writing assignment, which as you all know is  Symon the Black, along with a critical analysis of how I have managed to produce it, or alternatively, to write something else.

I do not know what I am going to do, and I am not having a good day.

Mark has been cutting up firewood today, so I took the dogs off out in the sunshine, and thought and thought.

I still don’t know what I am going to do.

Write something else I suppose.

The Magical Adventures Of A Truculent Taxi Driver.

Hmmm.