... I asked for the location of the pickup, and remembered her. The complaining passenger was distressed when I arrived at the address. Her 'friend' had thrown all her stuff out of the car (before I arrived on scene). The passenger's daughter's birthday cupcakes were 'ruined'. We first went to get the daughter a short distance away.
Mom wanted daughter to get in the cab. Daughter protested that it was her birthday, that she was having a good time and wanted to stay.
Eventually mom won the argument. Daughter got in the front passenger seat, as if to say "fine I'll come but I'm not sitting back there with you."
I chatted with the daughter to hopefully take her mind off her mom ruining her birthday celebration. At the end of the ride I was going to ask something, then reconsidered as that would be crossing the line into 'creepy taxi driver' territory.
After hearing my version of the story, the safety manager told how the person who took the complaint had commented that if I was actually a problem, 'mom' would probably have called sooner than 3 days after the ride.
The company safety manager had stories of his own about how his efforts to be helpful were misinterpreted...
He also told of another driver who had some unaccompanied pre-teen girls. They wouldn't stop playing with the power windows, so he disabled their button, which greatly irritated the girls. When they got home, they told their mother that their driver had touched them. Mom called the police, who investigated... the taxi company consulted the cab's GPS logs, which were suspicious on account of the driver stopping his meter some time post-trip in the car wash... The driver was sweating bullets for a few weeks. The girls eventually confessed they'd made up their story...
There are certainly women who have problems with their drivers, but slander is a problem for the drivers too.