Not Flashback

Haven't posted in a while, here's what was gonna be my flashback assignment. And then I realized I was kind of doing it wrong. But I didn't feel like just trashing it.

Warning: If you've read anything about my Carillon Point character, I think I totally butchered his characterization.

I’ve had better days. Oh yeah. Definitely better.

It started okay. Great breakfast (Honeynut Cheerios!), nice bright and sunny day (the high for the day is 87°, no expected overcast), and back at home sweet home (I love you, Carillon Point, but it is way too chilly up there and you practically redefine gang wars). So actually, it started great. The old yellow taxi, the one that perpetually smells like booze no matter what I use to clean it, started up fine and ran like a brand-new Prius. So actually, it started fabulously.

And then, it was 9:00 PM. And then my day became a trainwreck. Nine is evil. It’s like six upside down and six is the number of the devil. This would matter more if I actually believed in the devil, but luck is my only deity. But that’s not the point. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to, before today, definitively say “At 9:00 PM, my life went from awesome to suck.” First, I had to pick up one of those people from the airport. You know. Those people. The over-weight, over-dressed, over-hyper, over-smelly, over-naïve, and over-ick tourist guys that are like…

“OH MY GAWD, WHERE BE MAH HOTEL. I DON’T KNOW WHERE MAH HOTEL IS. BUT THERE IS LIKE THIS HOTEL SOMEWHERE IN TOWN. THAT I GOT TO BE AT. IT STARTS WITH A B. OR WAS IT A D? I DON’T KNOW. OH MAN THAT TOWER IS WICKED. DO YOU LIKE BOOZE. I LIKE BOOZE.”

Yeah. THOSE PEOPLE. The people you can just feel the caps lock in their speech, that smell like turd, and waste your time and money. But us taxi drivers are too nice to do anything to anybody that can pay. So I had to settle with this fellow for two hours, and I only got about $250 dollars. Maybe you don’t realize how bad this is. Most of our money comes from the initial fare – ideally, we hunt down the random lazy pedestrians that pay a full ten dollars to be dropped a single block down, in less than a minute. A good run is maybe… twenty rides an hour, two to four minute runs, ten to fifteen dollars each. So around $240 an hour…. and in two hours, I got $250.

Suffice to say, I was not very pleased. It’s not like the man was very pleasant company for those two hours either – we went to six different hotels to check in and I was seriously tempted to gun it and leave by the third mistaken hotel. However, he hadn’t paid me yet so I didn’t. Afterwards, after I sighed a breath of relief, rejoiced, and found another potential paying couple…

I believe their initial reaction was “What the hell is this smell? Honey, wait a second… Sir, nobody wants to ride in something that smells like this. Honey, let’s find another taxi.”

What.

Yeah. By this point, I was like, I'm pretty sure IM DOIN IT RONG. But it was amusing and somewhat cathartic, so it wasn't a completely lost cause.