Reluctant Fare

I went to pick up a guy from a house party this Sunday morning and when I arrived outside the house he came staggering out and gave me the fare and sent me away. This was the second time he had done this strange thing that morning.
He explained drunkenly that he had not yet had enough beer to go home and face the almighty rage of his wife "she’ll rip my face off and feed it to the dog" he said." Can you send me another taxi in half an hour, I'll have a few more beers" he said. How many more taxis he paid and sent away after that I don’t know perhaps I should have parked around the corner and kept going back for the money every twenty minutes.

Placebo Effect

Two young lads, about eighteen or nineteen who were passengers in the taxi today had had a drop or two to drink but were polite and well behaved.
They had a bit of a run around calling at a house to get changed and the grog shop for more beer, but the last port of call before I dropped them off threw me a bit.
They asked to stop at a shop that sold amongst other things tropical fish supplies.
They both dashed in and within fifteen seconds come out again swallowing some of the "other things" that the shop specialises in.  Legal highs, plant food, bath salts call it what you will but it's what a heck of a lot of the younger generation are gleefully consuming.
Now to me the way these two jokers started acting really weird after a maximum of maybe two minutes of necking this unknown white powder could have had one of two explanations.
The first is that this magic space dust works as soon as it hits your tongue and somehow you are in nirvana within seconds.
The second and the more plausible explanation to me is that maybe some of the effects are psychological a bit like giving a four year old wine gums and telling them that it will make them drunk.  The placebo effect they call it, all in the mind. But seriously if they are going to consume this mystery crap shouldn't the people who supply it take the time to check that they know the effect it will have on them and how long it will last and what the risks are. 
Or maybe it's all a bit of a magical mystery to them, but what the hell it sure keeps the money rolling in for them.         

Lost

Now and again, I will pick some joker up who tries to catch me out by asking to go to a street with no houses on which very few people have heard of.

 A few local examples of these in Barrow in Furness are Water St, Reservoir St, Thomson St, and Wesley Place. The only time I do get caught out funnily enough is when at the end of a long busy tiring shift my mind will go blank when I am asked to go to somewhere I go to every single day.

But the fun really starts when I get jobs in the outlying villages and countryside especially when I am given vague directions to a place with just a house name.

 I always find that even in the most remote hamlets when I stop to ask the way it always turns out to be a stranger to the area or the local village idiot I pick.

 On one particular job a while back I picked a chap who looked sensible enough but when asked the way he replied “Ista gaan duwn yonder ginnel past meda wi sterks bur tat la left an gaas on abit lal git ta laurel hedge ista gaas onabit las lare. So that's exactly what I did and amazingly, I found it fairly easily.

But I couldn't  help keep laughing to myself after that thoughts kept entering my head of this guy doing the voice directions for those new fangled satellite navigation devices you get nowadays.

Pre-booked cab

Some people will always book their taxi well in advance and will ask for a taxi at 9am or 10.30pm or five to eleven etc etc but there's always one that has to be a bit eccentric I suppose..

I didn't think anything of it at first until I noticed on the PDA screen (image to the left) that the job was pre-booked for 9.02pm and even so I thought that the customer had rang it asking for it in 20 mins and the telephonist at our end had booked it in as 20 minutes from the current time for example but curiosity got the better of me and so I questioned the young man and asked "What time did you book your cab for" expecting him to say 9pm. He actually said 2 minutes past nine and went on to explain that he was meeting a girl in the pub and had told her that if she wasn't there by 9pm that he would be going without her and he had rang the taxi at 8pm ish anticipating that she wasn't going to turn up and allowed 2 minutes at 9pm and then got in the taxi and went on his way.