Extracts from my first solo book which I have recently published about the two years I spent driving a private hire car rather than being a clergyman. It began life as a piece of auto-catharsis and turned into a project. If I can sell some I can start recouping my costs!


The Collar and the Cab
Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it as well as a number of independent retailers.

20
Farsley – Feeding Frenzy and
Flighty Fickleness

On the face of it the procedure for allocating work was open and
fair, but inevitably no system can ever be quite that simple. There
were a number of jobs that never reached the computer system
but which, for various reasons, were allocated to specific drivers,
and this was where the difficulties mainly arose over the practice
of “Feeding.” Sometimes, for instance, a driver would do a favour
for the company by picking up a member of staff, or taking a
sick vehicle to the main dealer for analysis; a driver might have
suffered a breakdown (mechanical that is – the company had
no time for psychological inadequacy) on a previous shift and
have been prevented from making a decent sum for the hours he
had worked. Rather than reducing his rent he would be offered
a particularly profitable fare that would effectively make up
the difference. When these lucrative jobs were received by the
operators they were usually placed onto a different computer
system to be allocated to drivers who were “owed a favour.” In
my experience this allocation of plum jobs was pretty fair – I
received my share, and found that respect and politeness towards
those who were responsible for allocating work paid dividends.
Other drivers were almost constantly moaning about the “shite”
they were getting compared to those they believed were willing
to curry favour with the management and offer an oral cleansing
service to the appropriate anal region. More often than not they
belonged to that breed of human being that finds courtesy and
good manners as easy to master as supersonic bicycle travel;
lack of civility led to being overlooked for good fares, which in
turn fed the paranoia, and a spiral of self-fulfilling prophecy was
the result.
Sometimes jobs were kept for experienced drivers, or those
with a good track record of completing work, because they were
part of a lucrative contract or involved transporting a particularly
important customer. Not unreasonably the company felt these
jobs were best allocated to drivers whose clothes did not provide
random additional ventilation at the knees, elbows and feet, and
whose cars were not the vehicular embodiment of a council
landfill site. Such preferential treatment was, in any case, a mixed
blessing. Several times I was called upon to drive half way round
the city centre to collect an executive from a television company
only to deposit him at the train station five minutes later for a
minimum fare, reduced because the job was part of an account,
and rarely received any kind of gratuity.
The system was, of course, open to abuse. Towards the end
of my first year I learned about a telephone operator who had
an agreement with a particular driver; he paid her £50 a week,
and in exchange she ensured that there was a fairly constant
stream of well-paid work coming his way.

More contentious, and more reasonable, was the complaint
that new drivers were “fed” with well-paid work in order to
help them through the first week or two so they could become
established. Whilst this undoubtedly happened it was not unreasonable to point out that all of those impersonating the
whine of the average company car’s gearbox were once new drivers
themselves, and almost certainly received similar preferential
treatment. Selective memory was seemingly employed to erase
the recollection of just how precarious the first few weeks were,
and how much difference the odd favour makes to a new driver’s
odds on survival.

When all the paranoia, ritual grumbling and self-inflicted
misery is stripped away the real complaint revolved around
the policy of the company to take on as many drivers as came
through its doors looking for work. This resulted in a belief
that there was an ever-diminishing portion of the collective
cake for each driver to consume. There is some truth in this; it
was difficult at times to resist the conclusion that the company
would have happily offered work to the entire population of
West Yorkshire given the opportunity, since the more drivers
there were the more rent they would be able to collect. Many
of us would have liked to think that we were the favoured few
engaged only after a rigorous selection process to sift the wheat
from the chaff, but the kind of selection that really took place
was only of the commercial Darwinian variety. Success in the
gene pool went to those fit enough mentally and physically to
make a good living; the majority, I suspect, became victims of
natural deselection. Like so many salmon struggling to fight
their way upstream the careers of most lay lifeless at the bottom
of a ladder designed for the benefit of those who controlled it.
They were not mourned, either by the company, who knew there
would be another batch along presently, or by the survivors,
who were too busy with their own struggle for luxuries like
sympathy.