Not Fair, Not Fare!

I may have mentioned I used to work in a taxi radio room.  When I started we used a two way radio system, the calls were written on small (almost) square pieces of paper, and they were dispatched by "auctioning" the call to the car who was (basically) closest to the pickup point.  When I left, we used a modem-driven data feed system over the air, the calls were typed into a computer terminal (A WYSE-60 compatible terminal if anyone remembers them) and the computer issued the job to the car who had been booked into the zone the hiring occurred in for the longest time.  I'll go into details on this later, as the computerisation process was VERY interesting.

Today's blog is a story of injustice, back on the old 2-way radio, however.  It concerns a driver who was having a very bad night, but was cruising around, who happened to come across a street hail at Hamilton Railway Station at about 1am.  The passenger was a single middle-aged woman with a few items of luggage.  The driver stopped the cab, and helped the woman get her suitcases into the boot.  The driver then started to take the woman on her way.  Turns out she wanted to go north, and it would have been a $25 fare or so, and at that time of the morning, after a lousy day, it was in all reality a dream fare.  (Inflation has turned this into a seemingly small amount).

So the driver did the right thing and asked the passenger whether she had already phoned for a taxi, and was told yes.  So he radioed into base, and said, "Control, I have Mrs Smith from Hamilton Rail".  The response was NOT what the driver expected.  "I have already sent a car for that, put her out and let him pick her up".  "Ah, you must have called the job on the radio while I was out of the car loading her suitcases into the boot, can you cancel the other car then, please?" The operator returned with "No, I've issued the job to the other car, put her out and let the other car pick her up!"

Since the operator KNEW who the first car was, and knew which car he'd issued the job to, the driver had no other option but comply with this stupid command from the base.  This meant asking the passenger to get out, and unloading her suitcases from the boot and then waiting for the other cab to get to the pickup point and re-loading all the stuff.  The passenger would have been bemused, if not frustrated.

You guessed it:  I was the first driver, and the Radio Operator will remain nameless in this blog (although his initials were KW).  When I progressed into the radio room, I knew this was just the sort of thing I should avoid doing to keep the drivers on side.