Holding The Baby

Some stuff will just never find its way onto these pages, some stuff which I see and hear would just be too hurtful to the folks involved. Other stuff can be told after the passage of time this is just one such story. This took place a good few years back now and maybe the people involved have hopefully changed for the better, who knows let's hope so. The job was to pick a fare up from a large house which was split into flats, it was a rough sort of place and I had to wait a while before someone finally appeared. Then two guys walk out carrying a girl between them who looked unconscious, they heaved her in the back of the car and told me the address she was going to. I went to set off but one of them almost as an afterthought shouted for me to wait and went back into the house. The two guys both of whom were drunk then staggered out with a baby held between them.The baby of no more than twelve or thirteen months old was thrust on the lap of the semi-conscious girl. The girl was that far gone she could not speak or even keep her eyes open and so when we got to the address I was given, I took the baby off her and knocked on the door fully expecting someone sober waiting there to look after the both of them. After knocking for a while with no response, the girl roused herself enough to stagger to the door, open it and fall in. She then tried to take the baby from me, but looking at the state of her I was not so sure that was such a good idea. I had a look around the house in case someone else was about but found nobody at all. I then tried knocking on the neighbour’s door to see if they could help, but they simply didn’t want to know. 
 Very reluctantly I put the baby down and left, I suppose I was guilty of not wanting to get involved. But of course, my mind wouldn’t settle, I kept thinking about what could happen, but then I kept reminding myself that the child would probably be taken into care if the authorities found out. I radioed into the office and had a talk to the lady operator she didn’t hesitate “phone the police you’ll never forgive yourself if anything happens to that child” she said. I drove around aimlessly for a bit longer but the more I struggled with it the more I realised that something just had to be done. The phone call was made and I never did find out what happened over it. I just sincerely hope I did the right thing, but who knows what's for the best. did I make the right call I wonder?

Numbers Game

Why oh why do people make the single biggest investment of their life’s investing tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds in bricks and mortar and then fail to furnish it with a simple £2.00 house number. How the heck they expect people to find them when I regularly find whole sides of a street with only one or two houses numbers between them I don't know. It’s bad enough in broad daylight but how on earth can they expect the emergency services to reach them in a crisis at night, or even worse the pizza delivery guy!
 Come on folks you can even get self-adhesive numbers buy one for your house now; it may save your life one day.
 Maybe there is a business or fund-raising idea here apparently it’s been tried successfully in other countries so why not here.
And maybe we should ban those pretentious house names and numbers in those silly illegible scripts.
 Whilst on the subject I know of at least one house on a street here in Barrow numbered 12/a instead of 13 and another which doesn’t have a number thirteen at all, superstitious lot ain't we!

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.         

Magic Roundabout

As usual this morning a bit of road rage was going on at our famous Tesco magic mini roundabout. 

When I reached the roundabout I heard the screech of brakes and saw the usual macho shaking of fists and posturing, and I could hear the two drivers shouting and abusing each other.
 In the end one of the drivers screeched off in a cloud of tyre smoke. Unfortunately for him this was witnessed by a policeman in a plain car and he followed him. When I passed he and the P.C. were having words but I was disturbed to see a boy of about seven or eight sat in the front seat of the car. Its bad enough acting in this way anyway but to let a child witness it is truly moronic. 
The approach to our magic roundabout is the one place in Barrow I would consider speed humps. There is this unfounded faith in the idea that the faster and more aggressively you drive at it the better and that everyone will automatically give way to traffic from the right. This and the assumption that every driver will indicate are often proved wrong.
 Or do they just hope that everyone else has brakes and insurance.

999 Taxi

Well it seems that the NHS now want cabbies as well as transporting patients home when they are still in a lot of cases desperately unwell now want us to attend 999 calls as well.
Not a lot of us have any sort of medical training or experience so if this is true then we can expect serious consequences.
I have had many cases of transporting discharged patients home and being more than a little worried about how they would cope when they got home. Some are brought to the taxi in wheelchairs and struggle to stand to get into the taxi. Then we have a struggle to help them out at the other end sometimes into a cold house without any way of preparing hot food for themselves.
We do what we can but at the end of the day we are neither qualified or paid to go beyond just driving the taxi. The other big issue is that if we do enter the patients property then we are not insured and are wide open to accusations of dishonesty or worse.    

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2513856/Dial-999-TAXI-How-stretched-ambulance-services-rely-cabbies-police-firefighters-pick-patients.html#socialLinks

Sheep and Ladders

I was talking to a fare today who told me that he had just got back from the Falkland Islands, he works out there for six long lonely months at a time.
 There are about a hundred sheep to every single man he was telling me, so I asked him if he knew all his by their first names.

Lots of daft people up flimsy looking ladders round here in Barrow in Furness putting up Christmas lights, looking at some of the dodgy ladders I can see the local hospital casualty department doing a roaring good trade.

What Barrow Taxi Drivers Put Up With

This is a small sample of what our local taxi trade here in Barrow in Furness has to put up with at the weekends. This is happening mainly after midnight when people have pre-loaded on cheap supermarket booze before heading into town. This is why the taxi trade is pushing for 3am early closure orders. Get folk out earlier and drinking in the more controlled environment of local pubs and clubs.

Hammer Attack

Reports are coming my way of a Bank Holiday super sunday assault on one of our companies drivers. Details are vague at the moment but it looks like it was a planned assault as the assailant was waiting ready to ambush the driver.

The story has made national news headlines and is available at this link http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/8603328.stm

It is so annoying that this sort of thing happens and it was only 16 months ago that I personally was assaulted and had a knife held to me. All we are doing is trying to provide a public service and assaults should not have to be part of the job description.

I really do hope that whoever this person is that assaulted one of our drivers gets caught and locked up for a very long time but knowing how stupid the British Jusdicial system seems to be then the accused wil probabl get away with a small fine or a slap on the wrist.

DON'T TEXT AND DRIVE

Is it a bird?.. Is it a plane?...

No..... Its low flying furniture.


about a week ago I got a call to an address in the flats on Barrow Island so off I trundles over the bridge and onto the Island thinking no more about this until I had to go through the one way system which meant driving down a street where objects were being hurled everywhere. A TV set came crashing down in front of me. There was already what looked like the remains of a wardrobe or bedside cabinet on the road all smashed up along with a few electrical appliances.

As I manoeuvred round the falling TV set I heard another crash on the floor behind me and a look through my mirror noticed that I had narrowly missed being hit by a low flying guitar, a lamp and a microwave oven.

Being a warm day I had the window down and could hear shouting and screaming between a male and female. It was a domestic and hard to say who was throwing the property but it was a stupid thing to do as its the school summer holidays, kids are normally playing there, traffic has to pass through the one way system and someone could have seriously got hurt.

It was pointless me getting out the car to try and calm the situation as I just needed to get the car out the way of any other low flying debris. At this point it was a quick phone call to the local police and I left it at that as it wasnt my problem, I didnt want to get involved and I had a fare to pick up and I`d rather be making money than trying to sort someone else's mess and lose money.

It got me thinking though.. Maybe time to change the highway code...

If you want to cross the road, look right.... look left..... and look up...