from late to mate

From home to the office this morning.

My cab arrives 25 minutes late. Worried that I might be angry, my driver starts on the offensive.

“Sorry I’m late, but it’s done me no favours either. Since I’ve taken on this job, I’ve spent 30 minutes in traffic when I could have been making money, you see I can only put £4 on the clock for a call out. The traffic’s had me right over.”

I nod, try to sound reassuring and generally listen to him letting off steam, until he realises I’m pretty sanguine about it.

“I was getting ready you see, thinking you might come out going ‘where you been’ and what have you. I would’ve turned round and gone ’sorry I’m not taking you anywhere’.

We talk a little about why he took on my job in the first place when he was so far away and the problems of knowing which jobs to say yes to, before going on to discus how come I live in South London but work in North London. He’s a born and bred North Londoner and doesn’t get on with South London at all. He knows exactly where our office is because it’s on his home turf, and goes on to tell me about the different places he’s lived in the area. After a pause he says “I had a giggle to myself when I saw the name Spinach [the name of my company] come up”. Which leads us to chatting about what it is that I do.

He’s now worried that I’m going to be in trouble for being late, but cheers up when I tell him I’ve a finite amount of work to get done before going on a skiing holiday tomorrow and it shouldn’t be a problem. The driver seems genuinely excited for me, exclaiming “Super!”, “Fantastic!” and “No wonder you’re so laidback about things”.

He tells me his son Harry is going skiing with the school at Easter. It’s costing them a fair bit, but he doesn’t mind ‘cos he know’s the lad will love it. He does worry that he might enjoy it a bit too much and “get caught up in an avalanche or something”. I do my best to sound reassuring.

During a pause, he’s clearly thinking about his lost earnings this morning as he brings it back up. We agree that January is rubbish financially, and he lists off some of the outgoings that are bothering him. He and his wife have are taking a couple of friends out for dinner at the weekend, which is going to cost them a pretty penny.

They’re going to the Wolseley, so I tell him about my friend’s pre-Christmas meal at the Wolseley surrounded by male celebrities (Jason Donovan, David Gest, Salmon Rushdie and Don Johnson were all dining). He laughs “Well there you go, I suppose come Saturday I’ll be the star turn there!”

As we get close to our destination, he starts pointing out places that have relevance to him. The pub that used to be a Lyon’s Tea House (not that he remembers it, his dad used to tell him”, the market stall he worked on when he was 14, the house where his parents used to live.

Once we’re at the office he says “there you go, my little spinach. Have a good day and a great holiday, mind how you go” leaving me with a grin on my face.

Driver blogs

As 2007 is only just getting going, I’ve not been taking many cabs. I thought about writing up some memories of past cab conversations – I may still resort to this if the drought continues – but then I had a better idea…

I thought ‘I bet there are cab drivers out there that blog’ and set out to find some. A quick search of Technorati uncovered tonnes of them and I’ve just lost the best part of two hours reading a few – plundering blogrolls and jumping from link to link. It’s great, there are drivers all over the world telling their tales and boy-oh-boy do they have some stories! There’s too many to take in all at once, so I’ve started with links to 10 that just took my fancy. I’ll add some more at a later date.

It was interesting to observe how many drivers have plumped for black blog-themes. I guess black is the ultimate cab colour – though being a Londoner I would say that, NYC drivers may beg to differ!

Family in Afghanistan

Late night minicab from friend’s home in Earlsfied last night

We start by agreeing how quiet the roads are. My driver tells me “before Christmas it’s all busy, busy, busy. Now it is like ghost town”.

He asks how my Christmas was and I tell him it was “good, thanks” before enquiring about his. Christmas, he feels, is a time for family so it always makes him sad that only a small amount of his family are with him in the UK – just his wife, children and one brother. The rest are all in Afghanistan, a very big family with many, many people.

I confess my ignorance of Afghanistan, I only really know where Kabul is. He tells me his family all live in a village 60Km north of Kabul, so if I know where Kabul is I can imagine where his family live. We go quiet for a moment as I try (unsuccessfully) to do exactly that.

Next I ask whether his family have been affected by war in recent years. “Not so much” he replies, most of the fighting is elsewhere in the country, nobody is bothered with little villages like his.

I ask whether he misses his country and he says “I miss my family but not so much the place”. He has been in London for nearly 10 years, life is good here, but so busy. He will never get used to how busy this city is.

Banksie and his fire escape ladders

Cab taken on Thursday 7th December from home to Barnes.

We started off debating the likely journey length then quickly got onto the weather. The day had seen unusual and dramatic weather but my driver had missed the worst of it as he’d been in a meeting with his web designer. Curious, I asked what he needed a web designer for and was very glad I did. It turns out my driver was the inventor of a successful product and now found himself reluctantly having to take on the role of entrepreneur. These aren’t his words but this is his story:

Banksie had been in a merchant fireman in his youth and had personally been touched by the tragic consequences of fire. When his daughters were young he’d bought fire escape ladders to keep them safe. As an ex-fireman, he knew that without instinctive knowledge on how to use them, just owning the ladders wouldn’t be enough to save lives, so he set about drilling his daughters in how to use them. The drills were less successful than hoped and soon provoked tears of frustration, the ladders were too heavy and cumbersome for the young girls to manoeuver – making them worse than useless should fire break out.

Banksie quickly realised that the problem was the design and saw what was needed – a ladder in a box that could be wall-mounted with a straightforward mechanism for quick and easy release in an emergancy. He was certain someone must make such a thing and set about sourcing them. He contacted manufacturers directly but was repeatedly told that no such thing existed, the maufacturers kept trying to sell him the same kind of ladder as he already owned.

One day, he drove past an sign for a patent office asking for novel patent ideas and on a whim decided to see if a patent existed for wall-mounted fire escape ladders. A few days later the patent office called him in excitement to say no such patent existed and they felt he was onto a good idea. So Banksie took out the patent and set about developing his ladder.

It took 5 years, a lot of money (Banksie and his family moved into a smaller house to finance it) and masses of work. Luckily he was working as a courier, so had pleanty of driving time to puzzle over it. The biggest problem was making them light enough to go on the wall but strong enough to hold someone’s weight. There were lots of small victories and setbacks, but he got there in the end.

The ladders were both popular and profitable. Banksie wasn’t bothered about running a company himself, so he put the patent up for lease and let someone else manage it. Things had been going well, but just recently Banksie felt he had started to get a rough deal – the people looking after his business weren’t doing it justice. what irked him the most was the fact that they kept putting up the price; making the cost of the ladders out of reach for the low-earning household – the people Banksie had always imagined selling to. He had decided to take back control.