Show HN: Taxi Wars – Stories from the front line
taxiwars.org
taxiwars.org
Three months ago, in the comments to HN submission 'RIP Kuro5hin', I posted [1] about my story having been the last to post, and that I was thinking about getting a domain of my own. One of you responded, "Please do that. I enjoyed your stories, particularly 'Who Are Your Lifelines?'"
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802
All of the current blog posts at my new site - http://www.TaxiWars.org/ - were originally posted as diaries at kuro5hin.org (K5). I'd started blogging about my taxi passengers at K5 in March, 2012, after my eighth lease. My original intention was to help me better remember all the interesting people I was meeting. I posted at K5 because I wanted to be anonymous, and was not looking for attention (the site had already shrunk to a skeleton core of users at that time).
K5 users voted three of my story submissions to the site’s front page, and one to section.
“Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0” is about how the taxi company’s pre-smartphone/pre-tablet GPS-enabled computerized dispatch system matches passengers with cabs: http://www.taxiwars.org/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.0/
“Who Are Your Lifelines?” is about the time that I bailed my passenger out of jail. He was a down-on-his-luck tech worker. He’d called me because he remembered my phone number. http://www.taxiwars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/
“Humanity’s Second-Best Hope” is about the dreadful seasonal job that I had just before I started taxi driving, mixed with some 2012-era political commentary: http://www.taxiwars.org/humanitys-second-best-hope/
The section story was an anecdote of no importance. It needs some editing.
The pages and posts are basically as I submitted them to K5, except I’ve moved the pictures and youtube videos into the stories (K5 did not allow inline images).
Speaking of youtube… The passenger whom I rescued from his new ‘friends’ built websites for people, iirc: http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/07/passenger-rescue.html http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/08/passenger-rescue-pt-2.html
This post is about why I decided to call my K5 account ‘TaxiCabJesus’: http://www.taxiwars.org/2013/04/origin-of-tcj-moniker.html
That post mentions Michael Crawford (whom I believe was K5 user ‘Zombie Jesus Christ’), who witnessed a murder while a student at CalTech. He eventually graduated with a physics degree from a California State university, but has struggled with mental health issues ever since. He was a prolific diarist at K5. Some of my K5 diaries were about visiting him in the San Luis Obispo county jail, that time he was arrested for stealing ketchup packets from McDonald’s (they dropped the charges and released him the day after I visited).
I kept notes about almost all my passengers. Some of the stories that I haven’t posted are of some importance. I plan to narrate “Ordinary Rendition” and get my EMACS friend from college (I suffered through a $100,000 computer science program) to help me find someone to help with animation…
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Thanks for reading this far. If you have any comments or suggestions about my little website (layout, etc), I’ll very much appreciate them!
I talked to another of the company's drivers early one morning, and tried to recruit him to drive for the owner-operator that I was driving for. She's a careerist, and has driven for the cab company for 30+ years.
This fellow sighed, and said, "You meet some drivers, and you know that they know that this is the best way for them to support themselves. The rest of us are just doing this for the time being, until we're able to do what we really want to do."
He was a carpenter, and much preferred working with his hands to driving for the taxi company. But the Phoenix housing market didn't need his services as a carpenter at the time.
I had to give up the taxi driving gig last fall, when something more important came up... This is one of the things that I'm going to write about in the future.
And while the Arizona legislature half-neutered the so-called "ride-sharing" companies, it wasn't enough to keep their brand of economic cancer from metastasizing to affect us too.
thanks for commenting!
You can add " / cover" to the background: CSS definition on the body or add the separate property "background-size: cover;" to make the image not tile on larger screens.
Great writing, I really enjoy your vérité style.
> Great writing, I really enjoy your vérité style.
thanks... I do some writing on other topics too, and try to keep 'fluff' to a minimum.
I'm glad you checked with mods before posting and if this is cool with them, then it's cool with me. But this smacks of self-promotion to me.
Also... Mitt Romney as a freedom fighter from the future who can help us stop Amazon's Skynet? Okay. Maybe I skimmed too quickly by this point, or I missed the metaphor, but this seems a little whack.
Having an online persona called "TaxiCabJesus" led me to make an extra effort. Some of the company's other taxi drivers have gone the extra mile to do nice things for their passengers too. But it doesn't pay the bills. Or it gets complaints filed against you, when people take it the wrong way.
There are around 44 diaries, written over the course of about 4 years. So that's less than 1 a month. For most of my tenure, I drove 4 12-hour shifts a week. There was nothing special about most of my fares.
> In every story I read, you seem to offer sage advice which people are almost immediately receptive and responsive to
The early diaries were a little different in tone to the later ones. Very few passengers were receptive... they'd think something I said was "interesting", then they carried on as before, as I expected - free advice is usually worth what's charged. Every once-in-a-while I'd get someone who appreciated my efforts - these passengers made it all worthwhile. I haven't written about most of them.
> Also... Mitt Romney as a freedom fighter from the future who can help us stop Amazon's Skynet? Okay. Maybe I skimmed too quickly by this point, or I missed the metaphor, but this seems a little whack.
This was mostly written as a tongue-in-cheek exercise to apply the 'skynet' metaphor to Amazon, and to the political system we find ourselves subjected to. Corporations and the political establishment make more sense if you figure they're run by autonomous war machines.
(EDIT: I enjoyed writing 'Humanity's Second-Best Hope' more than anything else I've ever written.)
> But this smacks of self-promotion to me.
'Who Are Your Lifelines' is a public-service announcement that I hope helps people think about who they'd call if they needed to get bailed out. People who are stuck in jail are helpless to do anything to defend themselves.
'Electronic Taxi Dispatch v1.0' points out that the 50-bazillion dollar "ridesharing" company is only selling a reinvented wheel.
Right now this is just about pointing out the fallacies of the status quo / 'conventional thinking'. At the start of my little journey, all I knew was that some things weren't quite right in my understanding of the world. Because I spent three and a half years in a taxi, dealing with all sorts of people, I think I've figured a few things out. This is my effort to share my experiences. It's on Hacker News now because another user here said they'd appreciated what I'd written on Kuro5hin.
Thanks for your comment.
I'm glad you learned through your experiences and it's nice of you to want to share what you can.
Regarding "Skynet" and automation at Amazon, I think this is fertile ground for metaphor and for science fiction parable. Some great works of imagination have been created in this vein already. So, I'm onboard with that, personally. I get lost at calling Obama an AI of some kind or Romney a time traveler, but I understand you were joking in a way. I just didn't get the joke, but that's probably on me.
4 years of interacting with several humans a day in one-time or small groups in a fairly closed, intimate environments will almost certainly lead to interesting stories. And to many, many opportunities to demonstrate compassion and care. So, I believe that, certainly. I am skeptical about the stories you described of holding people's heads in just such a way so as to relieve pressure and bring emotional balance in the same way that I am skeptical about ads that proclaim a simple pill can grow the size of a man's genitals or that "one weird trick" causes dramatic and rapid weight loss. But, as I said, that skepticism is part of my questioning and curious nature, so it's nothing personal or specific and I hope it didn't come across as such. (By the way... I may well have missed it, but do you have a more detailed description of this technique and some knowledge or theories on the pathways by which it works? If this works, it should be taught and popularized!)
Thanks again for your reply and I wish you well. It's great that you take a compassionate point of view and apparently try to help people whenever possible. I wouldn't want my questions here to take anything away from that general principle.
> (By the way... I may well have missed it, but do you have a more detailed description of this technique and some knowledge or theories on the pathways by which it works? If this works, it should be taught and popularized!)
The self-appointed gatekeepers to conventional medicine are hostile to the theories about why it works.