The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

You can order the book direct from myself or from the publisher by following the link above.

 28
Moortown – Doing a Runner and
Other Ways of Abusing Taxi Drivers
  One of my friends is a police officer who does a fantastic job on
her beat in making the community a safer and nicer place to live.
She once told me just how difficult it is for a beat bobby to catch
a villain intent on running away, unless inebriated literally to the
level of leglessness. ‘The problem is the amount of gear we have
to carry’, she complained. ‘By the time I’ve attached my stick,
spray, handcuffs, whistle and all the other paraphernalia we have
to carry, then put on my stab-resistant jacket, hat and boots at
the start of a shift I weigh a ton and can hardly break into a trot’.
Private hire drivers just wear ordinary clothes, though in later
times my particular company did begin issuing uniforms (when
I say “issuing” I mean selling them to the drivers at a profit
having made them compulsory.) But inside the cab is likely to be
money, sat-nav, ‘phone, wallet, and various electronic gadgetry
for which the driver is responsible. So when a customer does a
runner to avoid paying it’s nearly impossible to do anything at
all about it, because it would mean leaving the car unattended,
often in dodgy areas, and then chasing some yob who is likely to
be half your age and racing through ginnels much like diarrhoea
through the large intestine; come to think of it this is not at all
a bad analogy.
So when this happened to me for the first time in the middle
of a night shift half way through my second year in the job, I
confess the only surprise I felt was that it had never happened
before, when I was in a position of such vulnerability. These
particular customers were in their late teens at a guess, two girls
and two boys, picked up from a twenty-four hour supermarket
around midnight and asking to be dropped off on one of the
dodgier estates in West Leeds. With a level of intelligence I
would not have expected they sensibly arranged for the girls to
be dropped off first, then when I stopped outside their supposed
address they simply opened the rear doors and disappeared into
nowhere.
What was I to do? I couldn’t leave my car unattended and chase
them for fear it would be standing on bricks when I returned, even
had I been able to catch up with them. Call the police? But then
what? Even if a miracle happened and a patrol car came to my
rescue, and then the unthinkable happened and they caught the
lads, what would happen then? The best case scenario, and a pretty
unlikely one, was that I would be paid my fare, but would have
lost half an hour or more waiting for it. By that time I could have
completed another two jobs, so the exercise would have incurred
a net loss, however much I would have enjoyed the satisfaction of
seeing them caught. So I simply cleared and looked for the next
job, and put it down to experience. But having realised how easy it
was to do this I was astonished that in two years of driving it only
ever happened to me twice.
What’s more I was able to have the last laugh over this
particular incident, because amazingly some three or four
weeks later I went to a pick-up from the same supermarket
and encountered the same group of youngsters. I couldn’t
believe they would call the same cab company having pulled the
previous stunt, but there they were, two girls and two boys in
whose mouths the eponymous butter would not deign to melt.
Fortunately they didn’t recognise me, and this time I jumped out
of the car in time to grab them should they try to run off. I rather
enjoyed what followed.
ME: – ‘Not your lucky day this is it?’
YOUTH: – ‘Wot?’
ME: – ‘You don’t remember me do you?’
YOUTH: – ‘No idea mate.’
ME: – ‘I’m the driver you ripped off a few weeks ago –
remember now?’
YOUTH: – ‘Oh fuck…’
ME: – ‘Well there’s two ways we can deal with this; I drag
you off to the police station round the corner and let
them deal with you or you can pay me the fare you
owe, and if you pay me double, and a bit extra, I’ll
take you home.’
Youth: – ‘OK mate – will £20 do it?’
How I was going to effect the process of getting one or more of
them to the local nick and then convince the police they had
avoided paying their fare weeks previously when I had never
reported it I don’t know, but fortunately they never called my
bluff, paid the fare up front (about double what it would have
been) and sat meekly in the car while I explained how nice most
of us drivers were and how we didn’t deserve to be treated like
this. Amazingly I think we parted almost friends, and certainly
there was no hint of a grudge in their language or demeanour.