Taxi
I talked to a guy last night with a great story about a friend of his who got a little drunk, took a pretty hard dive and broke a few bones. As he lay there all but immobile, a taxi driver came up and asked if he wanted to go to a hospital. The guy said he didn't, that an ambulance had already been called. The cab driver shrugged, then reached for the guy's wallet and ran off with it as the poor slob lay helpless on the ground.
It's a secondhand story, but it rings true because the cab driver was honest and helpful to a point but, come on, he was presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help himself to a free wallet.
There are quite a few stories about dodgy cab drivers and robberies. You definitely need to be careful. Still, I don't take cabs very often, but I have twice had cab drivers round down the fare. On another occasion, the cab driver knocked a couple pesos off the total because I asked him to take me to a store that he hadn't known about and, as he said, discovering that store was worth something.
Maybe they could only afford this generosity because their wallet-snatching gigs were going so well for them.
4 comments:
Last time I was in Buenos Aires a cabbie told me that some jerk spilled his Persico ice cream cone on the back seat of his cab, jumped out and ran away. He said the guy was some "American as$hol@."
Do you knowanything about that?
I only know that it couldn't have been me -- I run toward ice cream, not away from it.
People in Taiwan kept telling me that taxi drivers were going to kidnap me, rape me, rob me, and leave me in some godforsaken place with no 24-hour convenience stores. I kept waiting for this to happen but what tended to happen instead was that taxi drivers would wake me up once we got there when I fell asleep on the ride home; or would drive me all the way home when I realized mid-ride that I wouldn't have enough money for the fare; or just give me discounts because they had accidently not taken the directest route to the alley that I wanted to get to, or just because I was a foreign girl out in the world all by herself or So after a while I gave up waiting. Maybe there just are no places with no 24-hour convenience stores to leave people in.
Oh and Dan, while I'm here, can we get some more detail on that how that kumquats-in-whiskey ice cream? We're sitting on like a pound of kumquats; we have to act fast.
While you're here? You mean, like, "here on the Internet"?
In any case, I don't know how the kumquat-in-whisky ice cream is made. I think they use elves. There were chunks of something in there, at any rate. Possibly elf, possibly kumquat.
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