Taxi Troubles

Woah...this acid is making me see crazy stuff...are those PALM trees?

After two years of overpaying for cross-town taxis, I was pretty cheesed off at the cab situation in NYC. Sure, I could go 80 blocks straight north to visit my brother in under 10 minutes for about 12 bucks, and yeah, I could avoid an hour and a half train ride back from god-knows-where-Brooklyn for like 20 bones, but it just seemed like a totally unnecessary expense! So when I was in Sri Lanka, and now Geneva, I thought there was no way that the cab situation here could be any worse than back home.

And it wasn't. It was totally better in every way, so end of story. Not buying that? Too anti-climactic for you? Well, you're an astute observer of the human condition, because right now I'm literally seething with anger about the taxi troubles I've been having abroad.

In the Lanka, of course, you're mostly dealing with tuk-tuks instead of actual factual taxis, so you're already taking your life into your hands when you hop in for a ride. These rickety-shaws are little more than a motorcycle with a bench bolted onto its back and the driver's training consists of little more than just buying the tuk-tuk. My dream of driving one of these babies sadly never came to fruition, but I can't imagine I would've done much worse behind the handelbars than any of the locals.

I'd explain to Driver where I wanted to go, and then we'd putter off down the highway seemingly confident in knowing how to get to my unpronounceable destination. After about 30 minutes of somewhat directed ambling, we'd stop on the road side and Driver would hop out to snap some quick Sinhala back and forth with a local police officer or shopkeep, and we'd continue on our way. "Wonder if they're friends," I'd think to myself. Moments later, after executing perhaps one or two soft lefts around drastically complicated traffic circles, we'd stop again and a similar exchange would take place with someone new. "Wow, Driver sure has a lot of friends!" After five or six more of these incidents, it dawned on me that Driver had no frigging clue where we were heading, and that basically all the people he was talking to were providing him unhelpful or conflicting directions. The result of course was a good hour or two of driving in circles, constantly missing our target and driving me slowly insane.

Based on the clock-work precision of everything in Geneva, I figured my taxi situation would improve once I got here. Luckily though the tram system is so great that until just last week, I haven't had to take a taxi at all. Then of course I went out on a weeknight, and the trams for the most part stop running by like 930 at night on Tuesdays. After a couple of ciders at the way funkier than me Alhambar, I walked my intern friends to the tram stop and watched as they ran to catch their ride home. Silly interns, I thought, running for a tram. Since I was heading in a different direction, I didn't bother to hurry. Mine will be along shortly, unless something crazy is happening, like their tram keeps running until 2 am and mine stopped exactly four minutes before I got to the stop.

I bet you think you know where I'm going with this. But you're wrong. My tram stopped running almost two hours before I got to the stop. There was no minor frustration with staying just past my curtain call...I had taken a full-on nap on stage and slept right through it, as well as most of the after-party! Frustrated and cold, I snapped up a cab and got rolling. Despite Driver speaking no English and me only having a basic grasp on French, I managed to guide us to my corner in just under 5 minutes with zero complications. Then I got the bill...15 franc for a five minute ride. I was paying over $3 a minute for this cab service! I was sick to my stomach, and just thinking about the sheer cost of this stupid cab ride was driving me slowly insane.

All in all, I know that dealing with New York cabbies can still be a big headache. They might refuse to pick you up when their shift is ending, and when it's raining you might as well just give up your afternoon cause you ain't getting a ride anywhere. But considering the sheer distance they cover with GPS driven accuracy and the overall comparative cost for said service, I'm promoting NY to "best cabs in the world" and will refuse to hear any arguments to the otherwise. Such mild irritations, in my humble opinion, are way more tolerable than being driven slowly insane.