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.

8
Rodley – Long Hours

 My final words to my wife the evening before my very first shift
were to the effect that I would start work at 5 a.m., and whilst I
knew I could keep my car till 6 p.m. I would not, of course, work
anything like that length of time. Thirteen hours wrestling with
the capricious and, at times, barbaric traffic of West Yorkshire
sounded like a descent into a netherworld reserved for the
purification of perpetrators of genocide, ethnic cleansing or
some other war crime. To my astonishment all thirteen of those
hours pretty much flashed by punctuated by a series of astonished
glances at the clock which, amazingly, still functioned in the
eponymous pile of crap. Having worked almost every minute
of those hours with only a couple of toilet stops I returned
home feeling exhausted, but scarcely able to believe that more
than half a day had passed since I had left home. I reassured
my slightly anxious wife that I would be unlikely ever to repeat
such a marathon, it was only that I needed to spend a day or two
familiarising myself with the way the system worked. Perhaps if I
had known that a pattern was set that would become permanent
I would have quit at that point. I opened my bag of takings; even
with my reduced rent I had barely earned the equivalent of the
minimum wage. Depression and anxiety competed with sheer
exhaustion to overcome me.
The rest of the week was pretty much a repeat of day one,
the welcome difference being the steady increase in my takings.

Out of bed at 4.15 a.m. and into a heap of excrement by 5, and
struggling to return the car to the yard after one last job through
rush hour traffic just in time for the rear end of a night shift
driver to land on the vacant seat.
The cars were thus run almost continually, perhaps having
a slight respite somewhere around 4 a.m. when work really did
become hard to find – though there were some day shift drivers
who liked to start about then. As I learned more about how to
go about making money in this new world, and the geography
of West Yorkshire became less like a Greek labyrinth, my takings
steadily increased, but my working hours remained more or
less the same. The working week of an average taxi driver is
something that places EEC directives relating to employee hours
in the “Noddy Goes to Toytown” category. Most people who
climb into the passenger seat of a private hire vehicle probably
expect that there are restrictions in place to ensure that drivers
do not work such long hours that they become a menace to those
inside as well as outside the vehicle. I was surprised to learn that
whilst such regulations are in place for almost every other job involving being in control of a vehicle the taxi and private hire
driving profession is inexplicably excluded.

 This is how the system worked in my company, and in most
others that hired out cars. I was a day shift driver, and in common
with all other shift drivers almost all of my costs were incurred
as soon as I picked the car up. I was charged a daily rent, and
since the policy was for drivers to return vehicles with empty
tanks another sum was spent putting fuel in for the duration of
the shift. This resulted in spending about £50 before taking any
money. The arithmetic then became simple. Once those costs
had been covered, everything else was profit (I sometimes used
to ring my wife – usually around 9 a.m. and announce proudly
that I was now working for myself!), and the difference between
going home with £75 and £100 was the difference between
stopping work when I felt tired and pushing myself to the end
of a thirteen hour day. Put another way a ten hour shift would
generate an income only a little above the minimum wage,
whereas a thirteen hour day could provide an additional 65%
and furnish butter and jam for the bread I had won. A really
good shift meant scones and clotted cream.

 The system seems ill-advised, and even potentially dangerous
to public safety, but it is the way most companies work, and in
truth it is quite difficult to see a preferable alternative. There are
a few private hire companies that operate a different system,
settling for a percentage of the driver’s gross takings, but this
is rare. It would require honesty and a level of trust between
operating company and driver that would have meant a
wholesale abandonment of the qualities that characterised the
typical bond. The relationship generally fluctuated between
genial suspicion and psychotic paranoia depending on what
sort of a week each party was having, and is seemingly almost
embedded in minicab culture.


 Autumn was beginning to yield in its unequal and futile
struggle with winter. For several weeks I had begun my working
day before the increasingly pessimistic sounding birdsong had
heralded dawn, and had dropped my car off well after the most
resilient creature had given the day up as a bad job. But if the
mood scales were weighted down on one side by the natural
melancholia of shortened days, the balance was more than
retained by ever-increasing quantities of available work and my
rapidly improving knowledge of the business I had entered. In a
formula of seemingly almost mathematical precision unpleasant
weather equated to increased demand for taxis. A dark, cold, rainy
early morning would witness hundreds of residents reaching for
that little card they had put somewhere advertising the services of
a local taxi company, rather than braving the walk to the nearest
(probably vandalised) bus shelter to be at the mercy of both the
elements and the largely fictional bus timetable.