Communication Breakdown Part One

“Talk to people about themselves
and they will listen for hours”
-Benjamin Disraeli

Recently, deep into the morning, as I lingered with my fellow drivers, waiting on line to consummate our payment ritual with the night dispatcher, one of my colleagues eyeballed me and blurted out: “Don’t you just love it when passengers spend the entire trip talking on their cell phones.”

I was taken aback: “Now why the hell would I love that?”

“Because then we don’t have to talk to them.”

This then is what our business has come to: a grim little snap shot of the collective taxi experience in the post-TAXI TV epoch. In an industry which long projected a folkloric mythos of old-school New York archetypes with earthy communication skills—a generation of gruff, hardscrabble characters manning the wheels, who knew how to get you anywhere in the five boroughs, while holding forth in a dour and intermittently good-humored way on any subject passengers might toss their way—there is now a complete and utter disconnect between drivers and the riding public.

The TLC would have us believe that the back of the cab should more closely resemble something betwixt a telemarketing boiler room and Foxwoods Casino, and that as per the claustrophobic partition designs in the new hybrid cabs, the driver should function as little more than a servile robot encased in a fiberglass booth, not unlike that which Eichmann occupied while standing before the Israeli war crimes tribunal (please don’t feed the cabbie…). Never you mind that this horrific Plexiglass contraption impedes the ability of passengers to see the meter let alone to communicate with the cabbie, or for drivers to safely and accurately deploy their rear view and side view mirrors. Not surprising given that such mandates invariably trickle down from people who’ve never spent a single day behind the wheel of a NYC Yellow Cab.

With each and every new regulation and technological wrinkle, the cab driving experience has become fundamentally more dehumanized. So why then are people surprised, even outraged, when more and more cabbies simply toss out the baby with the bathwater: tuning out both the oppressive, endlessly looping din of the TAXI TV, as well as any connection with the passengers—leading some drivers to manifest indifferent, even unprofessional behavior.

Years back I used to hear a lot of “…oh, you’re the first white cab driver we’ve ever had,” but I quickly poured cold water on that polluted stream of discourse: “What ever gave you the impression that I was white?” Huh? Then there were those who observed that I was their “first American cab driver.” Well, it has always been an immigrant’s business—it’s just that the nature of immigrants has changed.

Now, many customers are pleasantly surprised when their driver demonstrates any inclination to carry on a friendly dialog: “You know, you’re the only cab driver I’ve ever had who was willing to actually talk with me,” a 35-year old Brazilian mother of two told me just the other night in wonderment. “Many don’t respond at all or are too busy talking on their cell phones.”

Never mind for a moment that according to TLC regulations, any form of cell phone usage by cab drivers is illegal. According to motor vehicle laws, civilian drivers are allowed to operate a motor vehicle when deploying a hands-free cellular device. But the TLC asserts, with some credibility, that such cell phone usage constitutes an unnecessary distraction, and that taxi drivers should devote their complete attention to the tasks at hand (and yet sees no contradiction in forcing drivers to endure the irritating, dangerous distraction of a TAXI TV system re-cycling the same programming over and over and over again).

Be that as it may, there is a more compelling reason for not gabbing away on your cellular while ferrying a passenger to their destination: how about because it is discourteous and unprofessional. I mean, what a bunch of nimrods; I take taxi cabs, too, and I’m sorry dude, but if you can’t even manage to muster half your attention to the task at hand—ferrying me to my destination in a safe and timely manner—well, you’re not going to pocketing any tips from moi. Good Lord, man, can’t you even wait until your cab is unoccupied to blab away on your freaking Blue Tooth?

How much effort is involved in offering a pleasant greeting to your passengers upon entering the vehicle? Or even a simple follow-up as to how their evening is going? It doesn’t take much effort to let people know that you are not some sullen, embittered slug. And from the passengers’ perspective, it often affords them enough of a comfort zone, enough of an opening, to feel comfortable in engaging the driver in conversation…or not as they so choose—it is just as easy to ascertain that some folks would just as soon enjoy a quiet ride, looking out the window, wrapped up in their own thoughts.

Still, you’d be amazed how many passengers are actually interested in the taxi driver’s lot: our experiences and reflections. Just as often, some pleasant conversation helps make those long, solitary drives home pass more easily. A few months back I picked up a young Hispanic woman in lower Manhattan, heading home to Bushwick around 2:00 AM following a long waitress shift. She’d already been turned down by a couple of other taxi drivers. I could not—and cannot—fathom how dumb you have to be to turn down any fare at two in the morning, let alone from a waitress or bartender, who more often than not are salt of the earth types, not unlike…CAB DRIVERS, who also work for tips and who deal with a lot of the same customers as we do. This precipitated a wide-ranging conversation over the next half hour, as we made our way down Broadway in Brooklyn, out beyond the Popeye’s Fried Chicken underneath the elevated train tracks on Myrtle, talking about the restaurant business and the proclivities of our customers, the shifting nature of Hispanic communities up my way in Washington Heights and in her own Bushwick neighborhood, the positive evolution of Brooklyn with influx of refugees from Manhattan, and her creative aspirations as a painter.

When I finally got her home, she laid a very generous tip on me, but I was far more moved when she told me: “That was fun—thanks for keeping me company on the way home.”

As another female passenger commented some time thereafter, “Well, I’m sure that many of your passengers feel exactly that way.”

“That may very well be, Miss,” I replied, “but she was the first person who ever articulated that to me.”

Not a gabby cabbie by nature? Or do you feel like some drivers that “I’m not getting paid to talk—I’m getting paid to drive,” well there are some practical professional reasons for engaging in small scale conversational forays. A few months back I experienced a pretty curious series of cluster-f*&k events: one night might it seems as though all of your fares are from Toronto; another week you might encounter female sculptors over the course of four successive shifts—on this particular week I had passengers leave expensive Blackberry cellular devices in my cab three nights in a row.

The only reason I was able to successfully return any of them was because I’d briefly engaged them in some small talk…nothing deep, just trying to be pleasant. The first lost Blackberry identified itself as belonging to one Ravi Gupta, which is tantamount to saying John Smith in Hindustani. Well, my cluster-f*&k for that particular shift involved customers of South Asian origins—I had five different fares in one shift, but then after all, this is New York City. One group of four was from Michigan, heading up to Rockefeller Center…they were tourist types, and they talked me up pretty steadily, mostly with questions about food and music and night-spots. Another individual was far less talkative fellow, clearly pre-occupied with his work, so by and large I left him be, until he asked me some questions, and from our back and forth I gleaned that he was in town on business from London, and worked in the financials there for Citibank. Having found his name on one screen, just by accident I fumbled across another screen where the credit on the bottom read: © 2003-2007, Citibank UK, and I immediately put two and two together—the gentleman I dropped off at the Embassy Suites on Vesey and North End. I called the hotel, asked if anyone had reported a lost cell phone and bingo—happy ending.

The very next evening I picked up a couple in the Village, who were very confused about the actual address of a Georgian restaurant in Brooklyn; I was able to decode the address they gave me, and translated it into where they actually wanted to go (they had avenues confused with streets, and it turned out that they wanted to go to Tbilisi at 811 Kings Highway, between E. 8th and 9th streets, just off of Ocean Parkway). During the decoding process, I discovered that the young lady was a Georgian national, that she was working in Washington D.C. and that they were staying at the UN Plaza Hotel. By the time I discovered their phone I was in Riverdale, so I had to wait until shift’s end to call their hotel, and again, someone had the foresight to report a missing Blackberry. The next evening in a driving rain storm, I hooked up with the young lady on her boyfriends cellular, and when I was just downwind of 44th Street and First Avenue, on Avenue C and 10th Street, he paid me to turn on the meter, I drove up the FRD Drive, pick them up at the hotel, and took them to another restaurant on the East Side, wherein they paid me the fare, plus fifty dollars, which was very gracious of them to put it mildly. But as with most cellular devices, the young lady’s entire life was on that Blackberry, so the simple act of engaging my passengers in a conversation had a positive outcome.

Look, I recognize that not every driver has my gift of gab, nor that many are so inclined to talk (or listen). The reality is that there are some nights when a cabbie’s lot weighs more heavily on him than others, and in such a pall of darkness, I could fall into a barrel of tits and come up sucking my thumb—at such times, it’s difficult to work up much enthusiasm for conversation.

But believe you me, it’s invariably worth the effort, unless you’re mood is so dark you’re like to scare folks to death. But even then, to me, the art of conversation is part and parcel of what it means to be a professional cab driver. And sometimes your conversations with customers can define your evening in a surprisingly congenial manner, making the time proceed more quickly, while leaving you with the feeling that you’ve touched people in a positive fashion—least ways, you didn’t add to their daily tsuris.

The communications nature of this job is far too important to be supplanted by cheesy infomercials and entertainment devices, but if taxi drivers don’t make some middling effort to reach out to their passengers (which of course requires the passengers to be friendly and open to some form of give and take), then our job will become more and more of a grind than it already is, if you can conceive of something so grim. And we will find ourselves treated with even less deference and respect.

In the second half of this article, we’ll relate the broader outlines of an atypical shift, highlighting those encounters we enjoyed (and those not quite so enjoyable) over the course of 10-12 hours.

By Chip Stern
http://www.chipstern.com/