Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Good Luck Flagging

Yes, got quite pissing mad this morning. No thanks to a bunch of money grabbing cab drivers and their worse counterpart, the taxi company.

Why? I got out slightly late and missed the bus to central, which inadvertently miss the company bus. What I do next left me felt like a keg of explosive ready to explode.

Taxi Stand
If you think that this is a place where taxi will stop for the people standing there, I am sorry to tell you that you are wrong. It's a place that either forms a queue of cab or a queue of people calling for cab. So, what went wrong? Are we that obsessive compulsive that we need to queue just to call for a cab? What happen to hand-phone? We might as well remove it and put up more phone both for the potential to call their cab company of choice. We should have another line for cabbies to just wait there till 12 mn just so they can start picking up fares that are willing to pay surcharges.

Cabbies
Have it ever occur to you that even if you flag down a cabbie, you can still be turned down? Never? Well I did, a few times in fact. The most recent being that I board this cab that just dropped off a fare, after telling the cabbie my destination, a beeping occur and he tells me that he cannot send me to my destination, what the fuck. No choice, trust me to have faith that the taxi stand is for you to wait and not to call the cab company which will take ages to tell you that there is no cab for you. How I wish I can call collect and let them measure the waiting time and charge it to their phone bill. I always have this belief that if someone make the line toll-free, cab company might go bankrupt by now, not because we are all nasty tight wads but the length of waiting could be somewhere between 3 to 30mins depending on how much you feel like slamming the phone. And the cabbies have the audacity to tell in your face that they can’t wait 5 mins because they need to make a living and that it doesn’t really matter to them if they are late for 10 mins due to road conditions while cars dashing here and there at 90KM/H.
And those lights are misleading. There was twice that I flag down cabs form you know which company that have coloured indicator regarding on-call, hired or available. No, they do not matter. For a few time, I have flagged down and shooed off cabs with green lights while the cabbies have the audacity to asked me if I had booked their cab. 1 surly driver even questioned if I was colour blind. Trust me, it took a lot of restrain to not drag him down his bloody throne and out into the real world to see that the stupid light is green. Once or twice is fine, to have the same stunt pulled over and over drives me to this conclusion: Dirty, lowdown, rotten curs, every single one of them that pulled that stunt. But of course, these are the bad eggs, quite a handful but not all of them are rotten.

Cab Company
They are just as bad; in fact, they might very well be the scourge of all this ills that befell us. First off, every call that you make to book a cab, they get part of it. This is on top of the cab rental and all. Guess whose pocket you are helping to line every time that you call for a cab. They are also the 1 that decides the fare structure, and that they have a herd mentality when 1 goes up, the other will follow. Only 1 company will usually buck the trend, but calling them will only get you the busy tone. And that it is only for a limited period, after which, there really will be no difference. If you look at our fare structure, it is really a piece of work as they will have to have 2 column of a B5 paper in size 6 font to put in most of it. Not to mentioned that boarding at certain places have another surcharge. I am just wondering if they will do the same for surcharges in Orchard road and Suntec any time soon

All I can say to those who needs to flag down a cab. Good Luck, you need it.

No comments: