Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Will a cab company allow their drivers to rip off passengers?

Does the company exercise much oversight over what the drivers are doing?  Usually, in my experience, the company doesn't want to know what any individual driver is doing.  If they have to know what a driver is doing, usually that driver has gotten the wrong kind of attention.  The drivers are supposed to be anonymous, running around all over the place, giving people rides.

Can the dispatchers tell you which drivers rip people off?  Yes.  Can the lower level management, the dispatchers superiors, tell you which drivers rip people off?  Sure.  Are they going to make much effort to do anything about any particular drivers behavior?  No.  If the only complaints that come in about Joe Doaks are over being over charged, Joe Doaks will probably drive for many years.  Why?  It's just a misunderstanding, and the customer is exaggerating.  Did the customer get a receipt, and did that receipt make it into the office for evaluation?  It didn't?  Of course it didn't, it doesn't exist!!

I took about 18 months off, drove a big truck, and came back to town.  The first thing that happened was another guy who'd taken off and been gone for a while forced me off the road in McFarland, and insisted I give him a delivery I had in my cab going to Stoughton.  Why?  He was going to Stoughton.  He was BEHIND me, passing me wasn't ok for him to do.  There was a regular time call coming up in Stoughton he wanted, and why shouldn't I give him $25.  We'd never met before, and it was an occasion for him to make a permanent enemy.  The point of mentioning this is, PC (his initials) was known to everybody in the company to be a rip off driver, and on this day I came to know it too.  He tipped the dispatchers every day, and that made it ok.

Bottom line?  Call and complain about a driver who tips the guy who's talking to you on the phone, and that complaint goes NO PLACE!  Call the next day during business hours, the big boss asks the guy you talked to last night about it, and the complaint goes NO PLACE.  Get the idea?

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