Runners

One of the most discouraging things about driving a cab are the runners – people who run off without paying. It seems like a small thing but it takes the wind out of you psychologically. When you get to the destination they usually tell you they need to go inside to get the money…and they don’t come back. You sit there waiting until it gets suspiciously long when you finally start to realize what’s going on. 

You have three choices. You can hope against hope and keep waiting. But you’ve already wasted all the time in getting to the customer, driving them where they asked to go and waiting for them to come back out. You don’t want to waste any more time.

You can get out and go to the door. But chances are that they either (a) will not answer, (b) they never went into that house in the first place or (c) you will get shot (at least in my imagination). I discovered the first two by experience, thankfully not the third.

The best choice is to just move on. As much as it you’ve been counting on adding the money to your day’s income, you’ve been set back and you need to be working on getting another fare. You try to leave it behind you but it eats at you for a while.

After you have a runner, you get gun shy. You suspect everyone who gets in your cab. You start asking for the money up front if the person seems iffy in any way. Sometimes this leads to accusations of racism. You try to tell them you do it to everyone but you feel the tension for the duration of the ride. Eventually the gut punch wears off and things get back to normal…until the next time and you ride the emotional roller coaster again. Thankfully it didn’t happen too often.

As much as you’re out on the road when driving a cab, you really get to see the stupid stuff other drivers try to pull. People were constantly trying to pull over into the lane I was in when there was absolutely no space to do so. My mantra, which I said either in my head when I had a fare or out loud when I didn’t, was, 

“Just because you want to, doesn’t mean you get to”.


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