There's this guy we used to hang with who loved riding taxis & was always interested in riding different services, vehicles, etc., in different cities & countries. He was quirky but he quickly became as dull as the tourists who visit famous foreign places on package tours & come back with obligatory pictures of the Colosseum & the Eiffel Tower, since he never went anywhere except to take a taxi somewhere.
Taxi drivers didn't like him much, mostly because he didn't tip well if at all (how could he afford to? money you or I would spend on hotels & food this dumbass spent driving around!) & he also made fucked-up requests - like, he once took a New York taxi from New York to Washington DC, then took a DC cab to New York. But to be honest he wasn't a very likeable guy. He was slimy, both figuratively & literally - you always got the impression he did the very minimum he needed to not be considered filthy. Kind of "mediocre clean." No one knew why he had this love of taxis. It's like he just found something to do & pursued it. Like those dudes who pick a college major that they think their parents want them to & do it for the rest of their lives.
After awhile, the people who knew him - the people we hung around with - developed something like an allergy to this dude. By that I mean we'd get shit like hives & asthma attacks & cold sweats & stuff whenever he was around. Not only did we begin to avoid him - not answering his calls, making excuses for not seeing him, hiding behind curtains when he came by, refusing to frequent places we knew he regularly went to - I mean, none of us wanted to break out in hives! - but we eventually realized that the same thing happened whenever we were in taxis. You know? We could just sense he'd be there & we'd start to hyperventilate. So we stopped taking taxis. We opted for busses, or walking, or taking our own damn cars.
The last time we saw him was actually on the bus. The dumb fuck simply couldn't afford to take cabs any more. He was living on some kind of disability because of a work-related injury (he actually fell out of a slightly moving cab while on an errand from work) & his creepy personality, his questionable hygiene & his lack of any skills made him virtually unhireable. So there we were, trapped on the bus with him, feeling queasy but also wanting to be nice, & as the bus got on the highway (so we couldn't exit until we were in the suburbs - trapped!) he began to list his woes, & we nodded patiently, sweating a little, wondering which direction would be safest if we had to hurl. When he mentioned not being able to find a job, my girlfriend leaned forward as if she'd been hit by inspiration.
"You can't find work?" she said. "Nope," he said, kind of sniffling. "Jesus!" she said. "It's so obvious! You should be a cabbie!" He seemed weirdly gleeful as he thought about it. He even stopped talking to us, saving me from a night of scratching all over.
Later on, I said to my girlfriend, "Great! Now we can't take a taxi anymore!" She said, "We're haven't taken a taxi in months. But now we know he'll never be on the bus!"
Last I heard he was stranded in Laredo because he took some asshole there but the passenger stiffed him & now he couldn't afford the gas to get back to Austin.
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