TriumphAnt

“There's an empty cab by the taxi stand
driver's in the cafe washing his hands.
Big diesel idles --- the keys inside ---
c'mon Sally let's take a ride.
Flag down --- uptown --- no sweat.
For rush hour travel, it's the best bet yet.
Taxi Grab.”

-- “Taxi Grab”, as rendered by Jethro Tull

Me and taxis: oil and water…

1. My apologies if I’ve whined about this before, but it has just happened to me again and it tripped my internal expletive response (you know the one – the one where you articulate the name of our Lord and Saviour, and assign Him the middle initial – “H”).

On a recent Ottawa day, the morning temperature was – or rather felt like – a ridiculous minus 42 (a combination, of course, of the ambient temperature with the added fun factor of the wind chill thrown in). Whatever, it was not the kind of day to encourage my hiking a longer than usual distance to a bus stop, there to await a bus at a time other than my normal bus-catching time so heaven only knows how long I would have had to stand out in the wind-chilled air performing an ever more realistic impersonation of Lot’s wife about six seconds after she paused to look back over her shoulder while fleeing the recently-divinely-immolated city of Sodom.

I had been placed in those circumstances by an early-morning dental appointment. (Minus 42 and a visit to the dentist first thing in the morning… “And how was your day, dear?”) So at the end of my appointment, I decided to treat myself to a cab ride into work. (There was a further mitigating factor in that my boss had phoned me at home late the previous evening to advise me that he was sick enough that he knew he would not be into work the following day, so he asked me to fulfill his day-starting responsibilities. My grabbing a cab would minimize the deadline-pushing effects of my own late arrival at the office because of my dental appointment.)

So with all that background as to why I grabbed a cab, I grabbed a cab. And the very first thing the driver said to me after I climbed in and told him where I was going… (Oh wait, one further piece of background. When I placed the call to the Blue Line taxi company, I gave the address to the dispatcher and began to add a few words of direction since the dental office is a few yards off the main street the driver could be expected to be travelling. “I don’t need any directions!”, snapped the dispatcher. Well pardon me for my courtesy and [BEEP] you too. So with that little bit of further mood enhancer to add to minus 42 and starting one’s day in the company of one’s dentist, I climbed into the cab and told the driver where I was going.)

He turned to me and said, “So what way do you want me to go?”

Now I am told that, in London, England, acquiring a licence to drive a cab requires an unbelievably rigorous process that takes years, because (again, so I have been told) a would-be driver is required to have an intimate familiarity with a good chunk of the city. But more than simply knowing where an address is, he or she has to be capable of conveying passenger to destination by the most cost-effective means possible. So the would-be London cabbie also has to know additional things like being able to use short-cuts and one way streets to advantage, and what traffic patterns are likely to interfere with the trip at various times of day.

(Well of course it does. The always-miraculous internet offers up a website called: “Taxiknowledge.co.uk” and here is the faq for what knowledge a would-be London driver must possess. For an especial bit of amazement, scroll down to: “Do I have to answer the questions in a certain way?”. Whoever my long-forgotten “So I have been told” source was, he or she was certainly spot on! Incidentally, I am also told that, by way of contrast, acquiring a licence to drive a cab in Vancouver requires that the would-be driver correctly identify “Canada” on a blank map of North America, two times out of three. But [a] you won’t find that in a faq*, and [b] I digress.)

* Whoops. Never underestimate the reach of the internet.

But I am really beginning to think that Ottawa’s driver requirements are starting to tilt towards Vancouver’s.

“What way do you want me to go?” ???

I often wonder (“often”, because the number of times this has happened to me is now in the double digits) what the driver’s reaction would be if I issued him a set of instructions that pointed the car 180 degrees away from my destination. “Take me to suburbia, my good man – get your wheels onto the Queensway and point your hood ornament towards the rising sun. After 40 minutes or so, seek out the sideroad that leads to the Cumberland ferry and we shall then cross the river, there to align ourselves so as to re-enter the National Capital Region from its easternmost Québec netherlands. Please feel free to take a little detour through the Casino du Lac Leamy’s parking lot because several of those darling leggy cocktail waitresses will just be getting off work and at minus 42 would perhaps welcome the opportunity to share a cab ride into the Gatineau core!”

“What way do you want me to go?” ???!!!

“Let me answer you this way, sir – whose picture appears here on the publicly displayed licence that clearly identifies the individual who is both the owner / operator of this vehicle and a duly contracted livery man to the mighty Blue Line fleet? Oh look, it’s YOU! I guess that would make you… the DRIVER. And let’s see now, that would make me (by default, since barring the presence of someone in the trunk there is, at the moment, no one else here with us)… the PASSENGER. Well my goodness, but this little system sure makes defining our respective roles in this vehicle easy, doesn’t it? To recap – you driver; me passenger. So get your wheels, and your butt, in gear please, and rest assured that if you screw it up by taking me across the river to Gatineau by way of every red light in Ottawa’s downtown core, your licensor will be hearing further from me! It’s minus 42 and I’ve just had a dental appointment. Know what I’m saying?”

But I’m Canadian, so rather than reach forward and throttle him with the cable connecting his hands-free phone to the headset he was sporting, I actually thought about it for a few seconds, and suggested a route to him. Then what did he do? HE BEGAN TO ARGUE WITH ME! “Man, we gon’ hit a dead stop at this time of the morning on Bronson; and Bank’s no better.” That, by the way, promptly eliminated from consideration the only two major north-south roads into downtown Ottawa, where I wanted to go, from the south end, where I was. This baffled me as to just what other choice he might possibly have had in mind... (“You haven’t guessed ‘Use the hovercar option’ yet, sir!.”)

So we compromised. “Let’s start up Bronson,” I proposed, “and if we hit a jam-up, we can take Gladstone or Somerset over to Bay and then take Bay the rest of the way up to Wellington. OK?”

“No problem.”

Rather than create one by launching into a vigorous oral op-ed on the state of cabbing in the NCR, I simply smiled and nodded.

“What way do you want me to go?” ???!!!???!!!

“I’ll tell you what. Put me in the pattern buffer and beam me over, OK?” crossed my mind, but I was possessed of enough sober second thought not to voice it, realizing that it likely would have been lost on someone who (in Ottawa anyway) until recently probably called Damascus home.

(On the off chance that you’re in need of closure, Bronson did indeed stall us briefly – if it was for more than 90 seconds I would be surprised – around the point it engages the Queensway access ramps. But once past that brief bottleneck it was clear sailing. And despite an outside feeling as though it were minus 42, I never even had to zip up my parka. My jaw, however, still hurt four hours later.)

2. In response to my most recent call, as the taxi driver drove up to my address, he pulled over and actually stepped out of his car as I was coming down the driveway to meet him, “Excuse me sir,” he shouted to me, “may I ask what is your destination please?”

This was highly unusual. Cab drivers in the NCR are forbidden from refusing short rides and the overarching law, as I understand it, specifically bars them from asking the destination before the passenger climbs aboard.

However, being a Canadian wimp, I answered with my destination – several dozen blocks and many dollars away. “Very good sir,” he replied, and jumped back into the driver’s seat.

As soon as I reached his car and sat down in the back seat, I wanted to know what was behind the request, so it was my turn to say, “Excuse me sir. Can I ask why you wanted to know my destination?” He replied, “Well we are not supposed to ask, but I just received a call for another fare very close in this neighbourhood, and I thought if you were taking only a short ride, I could deliver you to your destination and return immediately for the second fare while still meeting the 10-15 minute pick-up time promise. When you told me how far you were going, I released that request to another driver.”

“Oh.”

That actually made sense to me. So dismissing any potentially hostile thinking, I smiled and repeated my distant destination.

Without missing a beat, he turned in the front seat, looked at me, and asked, “So… which way do you want me to go?”

= = = =

Oddities seen, or heard, or maybe just osmosed from randomly passing thought waves…

1. “There followed the most incredible piece of mime you have ever seen…”

In the wake of the March 7 crash of an airliner on a runway in Indonesia in which, despite several deaths, there were also a great many survivors, CBC-TV Newsworld reporter Nancy Wilson was interviewing by phone a Canadian aid worker who witnessed the crash. Understandably somewhat upset by what she’d seen, the aid worker nonetheless gamely described how she joined several people to help in any way they could. “We helped one couple who were too shell-shocked to say anything at all, but they told us a horrifying story of the scene aboard that airliner as people struggled to escape…”

2. Uh huh

My boss, recently clarifying for me why he wanted me to move a section of a report I had written to a differently titled section of the same report: “Labour mobility is not a Labour issue.”

Now I know that more than one Baby Duckling out there is looking at that and nodding to self, thinking, “Of course it’s not.” But I still have some climbing to do, it seems, on the vast departmental (emphasis on “mental”) learning curve.

= = =

Yet another collectivization bites the dust.

A recently-released UN report from something called “Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination” calls on the Government of Canada to stop using the term “visible minorities” and “ethnocultural communities” to describe people it considers might be susceptible to racial discrimination. The UN does not, however, suggest what assemblage of English words might be called upon to describe such people. In rationalizing their recommendation, Patrick Thornberry, a member of the committee who is also a British Professor of International Law, explained it this way:

“The use of the term [visible minorities] seemed to somehow indicate that ‘whiteness’ was the standard, all others differing from that being visible.” (National Post, March 8)

Whatever that means.

But this clearly presents us with a quandary here north of the 49th where we pride ourselves on living not merely the passiveness of non-exclusion, but also on living (that’d be “walking the talk”) the activeness of inclusion. But we gotta know how to describe all those people we actively want to include, don’t we?

So then, how now does one articulate anti-discrimination policies without using some kind of language to describe those against whom we might wish to prevent such discrimination?

I know – let’s adopt the UN’s other suggestion (also quoted in that same National Post article) – that Canada (and everyone else) stop upsetting equitable treatment by “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin” (to which, if I might be so bold, I would add a further qualifier that the UN seems a little too conveniently to have overlooked – gender).

And I have a really GREAT IDEA! Let’s hire people based on something – and ONLY something – really radical: their qualifications for the position.

(That loud “Bang!” you heard was the noise of Government of Canada Human Resource policy wonks’ brains simultaneously exploding.)

My suggested alternative – “The Great Unwashed” – probably has a few problems best left unaddressed here.

À la next time.