Conversations with Cab Drivers

I suppose it's my fault for not telling most of you that I've found a new job with the Asia NZ Foundation. Then again, it's my fault for not touching this for the longest time, but you should know that by now.

Anyhoo, the job's excellent, things are going great, the best part of it is that unlike my previous job, I get to travel. A lot, actually, since we're hosting the Auckland leg of the Diwali celebrations. By travel I mean from the airport to the city and vice versa, not to catch flights unfortunately, but to do a meet and greet. In that sense it's not all that different from my previous job as well, but then again, I finally get to see the blardy sun.

A very alien concept this: I don't own a car. This is practically unheard of among KL and Auckland urbanites. I do have a sheaf of taxi chits, and this is how I stumbled upon taxi drivers.

The wonderful people of the Auckland Co-Op Taxi company, which I use solely because they are everywhere, wield the power to make or break your day. Take the example of my first ride with them back from the airport. This time I was on my way back from Wellington, where I had met the team earlier, a couple weeks before I started on my new job. I was happy and excited and was telling the wooden wall about it for about 15 minutes before giving up. Then he overcharged me by $15. What an anticlimax to an otherwise glorious day being on an airplane twice in 12 hours. Still, that has been the only bad experience.

Rama, who drove me back from the airport after sending someone off, told me about how he spent his long weekend, where he took the kids, and how he was going to drive until 11 that night. "What about the kids?" I asked, to which he said, "They'll have had enough of me over the weekend, and me of them."

Kris, whose wife owns a trinket store, told me how he only moonlights as a taxi driver. "Sometimes I feel as though I'm my wife's unpaid employee." He did the Diwali celebrations in Manukau, manning the stall for hours and ran himself ragged there, and not to my surprise will be doing the one this weekend which I'm running myself ragged for. "See you this weekend," said I as I hopped out. "Unfortunately," said he, wearily. Hilarious.

Jim greeted me in front of the Auckland Museum with the perfect pronunciation of my name. I was surprised on two counts - one, that the operator got it right, and two, that Jim got it right, being a pakeha (NZ European). Now as much a Crown entity as NZ can claim heritage from, the Queen's English is in shocking disuse. Don't get me started on spelling. The other day I heard "hotting up" in a TV trailer. That's blardy national TV. Okay, "Ezra" isn't an English name per se but what about the Christian heritage?

Jim did have an unfair advantage. His alter ego was Jim the preacher, which he actually did to old folks at the Sunset Rest Home. Through the 15 minutes it took for us to beat the traffic back to the New President, he did a social commentary the likes I've never heard of in a long time. Persuasive but never pushy, he sounded more like the taxi driver who gets you to the right places in your mind instead of a pushy preacher. Not that he didn't lament about the lack of drive in the convictions of today, but he did so without prejudice and pall.

I actually walked out of that cab feeling like I just walked out of a church on Christmas morning.