my friend the taxi driver

i dont really understand peoples' anger with taxi drivers. in my entire life that i ever took a cab, i've never encounter one that wont take me to my destination. what i dont really understand, is that ppl stop a taxi and ask the taxi while still standing beside the taxi as to whether the taxi driver will go to a particular destination. when you do that, you are actually asking the taxi driver whether he wants to go there or not. i on the other hand, when i will hail a cab, i'll get into it, sit down and wait for the taxi driver to ask me where i want to go. and they always take me to my destination.

i have a friend that drives a taxi, and let me tell you, being an honest taxi driver, is damn susah. he said that taxi drivers already has a bad reputation whether he is good or bad. the first impression anyone has on a cab driver, is bad. and driving taxi for a living, is not an easy occupation. it is tiring and dangerous. tiring cause you are driving abt 12-15 hours a day. dangerous because by night fall, ppl tend to rob taxi drivers. how much can you make ? it all actually depends on you. if you rent the taxi, rental + gas is abt Rm50++ a day. my friend says that if he drives abt 17 hours a day that is 9.00am-2.00am for the whole month, he might be able to make Rm4-5k, but it is damn tiring.

the whole purpose i'm writing this, is that the other day, there was some kind of operasi to catch taxi drivers that dont use meters and refusing to go to certain destination. what they did was, some plain cloths officer will get into the listed taxis and set a trap for them. the thing is this, the whole operation, according to my taxi friend, the authorities only nabed chinese taxi drivers, which actually pissed them off. so i mildly ask, maybe the majority of the taxi drivers are chinese, he said no, there are more malay taxi drivers. and he said whether you believe or not, most taxi drivers that dont use meters are malay. and to make things worse, he claim that it was also in the malay daily in regards to this operasi.

1 point i like to ponder upon is the destination that taxi drivers do not wish to go. i dont really blame them, do you know in connaught, come after office hours and especially during heavy down pour, the entire stretch of the connaught highway is jam, the journey from the toll to the u-turn or phoenix plaza takes abt 30-45 minutes, compare to a mere 5-10 minutes when it is not jam. well if you are a sales man you wont want to sell things where there are little customers right ? or if you run a mamak stall, you wouldnt want someone hogging the tables with just 1 teh tarik right, its the same concept different application. the taxi driver just dont want to be stucked for hours in a single destination, how do you expect him to make a living then.

well i hope my friend is right, then i can do more gamen bashing !
bring it on anonymous the ball is in your court.