A Pleasant Surprise - A Taxi Cab Confession of Sorts

This past weekend I flew into Boston and was shocked, in a pleasant way. The cab driver who rode me from the airport to the place where I was staying for the night was something of a dinosaur in the sense that he engaged me in a conversation. Ten years ago there would have been nothing extraordinary about this, but with the proliferation of cell phones, the fall in their prices, and widespread free nights and weekends, the cab experience has been drastically altered.

I still can recall the first time I stepped into a cab to find the driver having a conversation on his cell phone. After receiving my destination location, he proceeded to start talking. I mistakenly thought he was speaking to me at first, and found his phrases to make no sense – they seemed to be gibberish. I soon realize, though, that his utterances were not meant for me but for someone else with whom he was talking on his cell phone.

Before cell phones became so affordable, cabbie conversations must have been pretty thankless. Some people would inevitably choose not to converse or simply not converse with their driver in which case the driver had to simply ride in silence. Then there were also the lulls in between customers that, save the radio and possibly a book, must have been the most mundane and boring times devoid of human interaction. So it’s quite understandable the appeal of cell phones for cab drivers. They must make the job go by a lot easier. In addition, they now can stay in touch with family and friends far better than before – indeed much better than most of us as they do so on the job.

I may be a little old school and I acknowledge the benefits of cabbies on cell phones, but still I miss the conversations with cab drivers of days gone by. It was something that I had grown up with and come to expect like rolls in a restaurant or a free glass of water. Cab drivers were some of the most practiced conversationalists in our society, and they always seemed to have very interesting stories either about their own lives or about things they had heard from other cabbies. Surely something has been lost in the cab experience probably forever.