The Fuzz

To the best of my knowledge we've had a couple of drivers become cops, and we had one who claimed he was a former cop. The guy who claimed to be a former cop, I'll call him WF, he never had anything like a nickname and without his written permission I wouldn't use his name here.

It's my understanding that Mario is a cop up north somewhere. Sheriff's deputy or something like that. Mario was one of my night drivers when I first started driving. Like all the night drivers back then he figured he owned the car until he was tired of driving. If it stayed busy late, he just wouldn't bring the cab in, and the five bucks for every fifteen minutes late, you are kidding right? Mario pay me for being late? Roy Boy would tell me it was the dispatchers job to kick Mario off the road, the dispatcher was usually Louie, and he would NOT kick Mario off the road. Dave, where ever you are, DO NOT come back. Mario did other cute stuff, now that I think of it, he was fond of doing doughnuts on fresh snow, for ten dollar bills, and he bragged about it. Doughnuts? Spinning the cab 360 degrees in the middle of the street.

Gwench is a sheriffs deputy locally. She was a good dispatcher, there was a piercing quality to her voice, and you could hear her perfectly at 60 mph with all the windows down. She once told me she either wanted to be a cop or a lawyer, or was it cop or a judge, now that I think of it I don't recall, but judges are lawyers. Her long time boyfriend, Jumbo, is a lawyer I'm told. We all liked her, she was good people, and to her credit she never came back and applied being a cop to anybody in the cab business. As Sandy Van Sycle once wryly said, "Everybody's doing something, all the time." And of course, legally, some of it is kind of sketchy.

Back to WF............. I'm not sure when he left, I only know he's not around now. This leads me to believe more confidently that he was never a former cop at all, he was current, and what ever he was supposed to be researching was found to be insufficient to justify him being here. He always had one of those blue tooth ear pieces going and he made a lot of phone calls while he was driving. When I found out he was a cop, I asked him why somebody with a generous pension would go out and try to get himself killed 4 or 5 nights a week. His reply lead me to believe he carried a gun. He said something about it being very unlikely someone would survive trying to rob him. How does that work? He went on to explain he was entitled to defend himself. Yeah right. If I punched the ticket of some poor under priviledged minority youth who was trying to rob me, I KNOW I'd be given the burden of proving he was trying to rob me. I'd need a bullet hole or a serious knife wound in me to keep from going to jail. Ah, he said, it was a question of credibility. Yeah, he'd pull out a badge, show it to the cops that came to the scene, end of story.

The most

The company is real picky about overloading these days, but it wasn't always that way. Years ago, the dispatcher would over load a cab, and the way that worked was you went to the address with 4 or 5 people in the cab who would agree to scrunch up, and ask the other folks if they wanted to scrunch or wait. They would usually, but not always, say they wanted to go now and they'd scrunch. Thus, most of us have personal records for most people in the cab. My records come in categories.

My record for most adults in a cab at one time was Perkins on U to the SAE house. The abbreviation for Perkins on University for the dispatch staff is P on U, I'm told. I went out there at about 4 am and the guys were all still drunk and they'd just gotten done pigging out after closing the bars at 2:30 am. One guy said when's the next cab coming? I said it would probably be me because not too many people were working at the moment. It was Sunday morning and most of the night guys check it in at 3:00 or so after the bar rush.

They'd planned on 2 cabs, 6 in one, and 7 in the other. We had bench seats in those days, 5 was a load, 6 was a heavy load, and 7 was a real heavy load, but dispatchers would do it back then. About the 3rd kid asked how many I'd take at once. I told him I didn't care, as many as wanted to go in this group. He looked at the kid behind him and said, "We can do this!!!" The other kid said, "Yeah!!!!!" With that they started piling in. All of them piled in. About a mile down the road the guys on the bottom started groaning and whining. The guys on the top were laughing their ass's off. When we got to the SAE house (Lake st. and the lake), they all piled out and paid me.

The most I ever had who weren't all in the same group came during the spring tournaments, the wrestling tournment to be precise. There were 2 groups of 5 at Jingles, if memory serves. It's not called Jingles anymore. Jingles O'Brian retired, I think. Anyhow, I pulled up front and they started arguing back and forth that group A called the cab, no group B called the cab, no group A, get the idea? So I asked if they wanted to scrunch, they said they did, and they piled in. 10 mom's and dad's of high school wrestlers who didn't have their spouse along with. You want to talk about a lot of giggling, and other little woopie kind of comments, they were all goosing each other until the first group got out at the Inn Towner. I wish everybody was that happy and fun to chauffer around.

The most I ever had in more than 2 groups was 3 groups of 3 but I don't recall the details.

The most the dispatcher ever gave me was 2 groups of 5 coming from the skirts to down town on a new years eve, the details I don't recall.

And finally (drum roll.....), the most I ever almost got caught with. 11 going from the Essen Haus to what is now Rams Head. It was warm weather, and the dodge diplomats usually had crank windows, so all the windows were cranked down. The last 2 laid across the rest of the people in the back seat and let their feet hang out the window. I'd gotten someone in the front seat to pay me durring the ride, so when we passed a cop going in the opposite direction in front of the Orphiem, the only thing I needed to do was get around the next corner on to Henry st., and get them out of the cab. I watched the cop make a U turn in the rear view window, and the cab driving gods were looking over me that night, the light at my end of the block was green. I whipped around the corner, jumped out the door, ran around the cab opening the doors and pulling people out. The cab was empty, the doors were closed, and the last guy was going through the door into the bar when the squad car pulled up behind me with his cherries on. The cop jumped out of the squad and rushed up to me, ticket book in hand, and demanded, "How many people did you have in that cab?"

"A few", I answered. He demanded that I tell him how many numerous times, and each time I told him I wasn't sure, a few was as specific as I'd be. I've never had a cop madder at me while driving cab. After about 10 minutes of yelling at me he finally gave up, got back in the squad, and pulled away. To my utter amazement, he didn't write me a ticket.

These days, per company policy, I only take as many as I have seat belts for, which is 4 passengers, 3 in the back, and 1 in the front. The old days were more fun, for a lot of reasons.

Perfesser Neilboy and the good old days....

Back when I started driving, there was no drunk bus. Drunk bus? Yeah. At bar time, we'd load up and haul students to the lakeshore dorms by the carload, and it was profitable. Then along came Donna Shalala who created the drunk bus. Most people in the university didn't care for her, and I can assure you the cab drivers didn't. She said that it was too dangerous for the students to find their own way home from the State st., Langdon area at bar time (I mean after all, they might step in a puddle of vomit and twist their ankle, right?), so the university had an obligation to provide bus service to the lakeshore dorms. And poof, just like that, every night driver made $50-$100 less on Friday and Saturday nights. The loss of revenue was a seven day a week thing, but on the other nights of the week it was less money.

As it stands, and has stood for a long time, if you can stumble on to a bus, the bus is free, and it will take you to the lakeshore dorms. They also have a program called Saferide, which they can use twice a month, which is basically a free cab ride, paid for by the university. Thank god we don't do those rides, I really can't stomach listening to a kid mouthing the lies about it being dangerous to walk around downtown. Send your kid here, if they don't know how to lie, we'll teach them. Where was I............., oh yeah, Neil.

Neil is called Perfesser Neilboy because he finally fucked up and graduated. Making him a PhD. He was a grad student when I started driving, which is an honorable excuse to be a cab driver. I've always liked the guy, really have, one of my favorite family members. He's really a bright fellow. Grey now, from NYC I believe, perhaps even Brooklyn, and when he talks, I'm reminded of an old TV show and a character called Gunther Tutti accent wise. He left Badger over a snit about a special needs passenger, and now drives a cab painted yellow. He claims it's the best thing that ever happened to him, and he's right. He's called Neilboy because he used to call Louie, John Boy. Louie was a nickname of a dispatcher who long ago left the business to become a realtor. His first name was John, hence John Boy. Neil was the only person who called him that. John Boy was the dispatching on my first ever day shift during the week, back when I didn't have a handle on bidding properly.

I remember it well...... I was about Park and Emerald, and some micky mouse little call popped like 600 W. Main to the square. I was on my way to the office to check in, which would have made it around 9:15 am. At 9:15 am on a Monday, that call is VERY hard to move. I, innocent that I was, simply wanted the last $1.50 of the morning (that was the fare in those days). So I started trying to bid for it. Every time I bid, Louie would answer, "Six Oh that isn't how we bid for that." So I'd try something else. When I got to Five Points (Park and W. Washington), I gave up and drove past the call back to 12 (the old old office). When I walked into the office to check in, Roy Boy was waiting and he apologised for Louie. I recall telling him I could make money in spite of Louie. He didn't need to apologize to me, it was the customer he needed to apologize to. The customer didn't get a ride. Was I bidding for it wrong? Sure, it was my second or third ever shift, but is that a good excuse to deny service to a customer? Louie was a jerk, and the tradition of jerks answering the phone and dispatching continues to this day, people complain to drivers about it all the time.

Neilboys latest sin was showing off a photo copy of a ticket Roy Boy got in Fondy not long ago. He was down at the green and white drinking, and he showed this photo copy to Ham Dinger and Dickdro. Dickdro went balistic, but he's that way, the ultimate company man, his license plate is a vanity plate that is KSA-768. Neilboys joke was that Roy Boy ought to pay $2.00/shift he works penalty for having that ticket. If we get a ticket our checkin goes up supposedly to cover the increased insurance costs.

To this day, I'd like to see Louie behind the barn, with a release saying that I couldn't be held responsible criminally or financially for the results.

My favorite thought about Neilboy is a ride I was doing short east at bar time one cold winter night. I had 3 guys in the back seat and I was passing him on Johnson st., just a little before Tenny Park. I pointed at the other red and white cab and said, "That's Perfesser Neilboy gentlemen, you may moon him if you wish." About 30 seconds later the kid immediately behind me shuddered out, "God damn, that glass is cold!!" And no, I did not take time out to wash the window.

Your office an empty cab.

That used to mean a yards run. You still hear it rarely, and it always means money, but I don't think we do yards runs any more.

A yards run was taking a train crew, 1-5 guys, from one rail road yard to another. Say, Janesville to Rock Springs. It usually meant you'd make a lot of money that day, hundreds of dollars.

When I started driving, the Hog was in France. He had a degree in French, and was qualified to teach French, but where an ex-con, covered with tattoos, would get a job teaching 7th graders French, isn't quite clear to me. I'm sure that like so many of us with dreams of escaping, he was combining a long vacation with a skills upgrade, and considered the trip an investment in his future. When he came back he was fluent in spoken French, though I think Du's skill's were always superior. As long as the Hog was in France, yards runs went out fairly.

It's always been the case that cheating causes hard feelings. I mean, after all, we're playing keepsies, when the supposed randomness of the business mix is tampered with there is sure to be someone who will be offended. It's not dollaroids you're stealing from someone else, the cash is real. It's never mattered who's doing it or which call(s), and I'm not the only none who gets offended. The company has always taken the line that they don't condone cheating and take steps to prevent it. Horse Pucky, I say. They have always looked the other way. Which is probably why, in the end, that we lost that account.

When the Hog came back, his expectation was that he'd dust off the throne which had been empty for a year, and resume being king of the night time dispatchers. I'd been driving about a year when this moment came. It would be a number of years before I'd become a night driver, so I only viewed this Bozo as another driver. He viewed himself as an authority figure and how dare some rookie driver with only one year challenge him or anything he did. Well, I've felt the same way when all of them came back, and they/we all come back (my longest pure absence was around 5 months). My attitude has always been, who the hell do you think you are?

The Hog did give me at least one chance to realize my mistake, and give him the proper level of respect, and ignore his cheating. He didn't much like the who the hell are you attitude.

How Piggie (the nickname he liked) cheated was inside information. Piggie loved to play pool. He wasn't very good at it, but he loved the pool hall and the game almost as much as he loved Badger Cab. It turns out that some number of Chi-Nor employees also frequented the pool hall. They'd tell Piggie when the yards runs were going to happen a day or 2 in advance. Then about 30 minutes before the call would go out, he'd wander over to the office and wait for the call to go out over the air. He was always first up. The other drivers in the fleet tolerated this because they knew the system and protesting it was a waste of time, or because they didn't know the system and didn't notice it going on (ROOKIES), but I didn't like it and said so. It wasn't until years later when Crawdaddy started driving cab that anyone found out how the Hog was cheating. Crawdaddy is also a serious pool player, also knew the Chi-Nor guys and disclosed the Hog's secret. Even after this disclosure, the company denied it and allowed this practice to continue until we lost the account.

The Hog would go on to mess with me until he was too old and sick to be a driver or dispatcher anymore. He also got Curley to pursue his vendetta's for him. This was the beginning of my years long conflict with Curley. Curley worshiped the ground the Hog walked on. If I had it to do over again, I'd act the same.

On the Banks of The Red Cedar

The Big 10 water polo tournament is in town this weekend, they're playing at the SERF. I had a guy from the Iowa team, and some girls from Moo U., in my cab. Moo U.? That would be Michigan State, and their fight song is the title of this post. When ever I get Michigan State people in the cab I ask them to sing that song. Why? Years ago, before I moved to Madison, I liked visiting East Lansing a lot. And, in fact, I hold cab permit #64 (I think that's the number) in East Lansing, but I never followed up and went back to the company to become a driver.

Become a driver? How does that work? I assume it works the same everywhere, but perhaps it doesn't. They tell you to go and get a cab permit before they'll talk to you about being a driver. So the cops checked me out, and I got a little pin with a number on it in the mail from them. I guess if I ever wanted to go home, I'd have a job waiting for me in East Lansing. Hmmmm, never thought of it before.

I've been hearing some amazing scuttlebutt lately. It's all related to the new 'system' which is to be installed in all of our cabs. It is, of course, being touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's GPS, and takes plastic which will be instantly credited to my account, and has all the time calls on it, and tells the office where I am. Where I am, but not what I'm doing, since we're a zone cab and if it's cash, they'd have no way of knowing if the cab is loaded or not, unless they use a seat sensor. No meter in our cabs. But the new system supposedly will know the price of every ride immediately when the ride is entered into it.

The scuttlebutt is related to why we're getting this piece of junk, and how it's to be paid for. Regrettably the scuttlebutt makes too much sense, but the most tantalizing of it, I'm unable to verify. The part I can verify is the lie Square Pants is spreading around, but it makes sense too. The screaming of the fat man described in the previous post also fits into this like a glove.

Square Pants scuttlebutt is that checkin is going up by twenty bucks a shift in January. He told me he got it from the manager of his company who got it from Roy. Then he turned around and told Bloomie that he got the same story from me. Bloomie and I concluded that it's just the little German trying to stir up some shit, and since he's including me into his bull shit, I won't talk to him for a few months, aside from telling him he's real lucky that shit splatters. I have to assume this crap will drift back into the office at Badger, but there's nothing I can do about it. They claim it won't go up, and I don't much care one way or another. If they were to do something like that they'd end up with more holes in the schedule, make less money, and I would probably make about the same amount of money. My own seat of the pants thought is, if it was me, I wouldn't risk the holes in the schedule, and I wouldn't do it.

Last summer, Schnidley started telling me about this wonderful system. I said then, as I still say, that I don't see how it's going to improve my business or income. We came to frustration, it's VERY important that people BELIEVE for some reason. Way too important, for the good of the drivers. So Schnidley passed me off to the fat man and he started telling me about it. Why with this new system, they could provide dispatching for a cab company anywhere. Badger Dispatching? I suppose........ But if that's the case why don't they start submitting bids to manage cab companies in small towns?

How does submitting bids work? I lived in a town not far from here that owns it's cab company. In order for them to take federal funds for their public transportation system they have to provide for the needs of the elderly and handicapped. In that town they bought some Crown Vic's and they contract out the management. The management handles scheduling, payroll, hiring people, and the city sees to the car repairs, insurance, and all that sort of thing. Why would the city want to do business with Badger Dispatching? They'd have to install expensive junk in their cars, and deal with a company that is 'somewhere'. If the fat man wants to run a company so bad, perhaps he should submit a bid, surely there are many such cab business's. So, I'm sure the fat man see's himself overseeing a vast empire of dispatchers in a phone bank like setting. Silly rabbit, trix are for kids.

It seems to me, that the people in the office are forgetting who brought them to the dance. A cab company without cab drivers just doesn't make sense to me. On the other hand, Cabs and cab drivers without dispatching makes complete sense, doesn't it? The words of Bobby will always be true, 'Dispatchers are people who can't successfully drive a cab.'

You can choose your friends but not your family

This is so weird, doing this while sitting in the cab stand at the airport. But, here I am. I got myself a MacBook, and a Blackberry that I use as a modem, and all of a sudden I who have used dial-up all my life, have high speed Internet at work. Wow.

I got into it with the fat man in the office today, who will remain nameless. I'm not yet ready to publish a book, and naming him any further than fat man could be a sketchy idea. He was livid, screaming at me to fuck off, and telling me I was lucky he didn't reach me when he tried to call me at home. Yeah, right. What was he mad about? Read on, and if any of you drivers think I was wrong about this do let me know.

Sunday night I'm headed toward the airport, when stuff to do pops by East Town, and north in Windsor. I'm up, so the dispatcher asks me to pick. I pick the Day's Inn in Windsor. It's a lady who wants a ride to a truck stop to use Western Union. I pull up to the hotel and ask the desk clerk to call what ever room it was, and she asks me if Western Union is still open. I tell her I don't know, and I don't, why would I know that. Then I sat in the car and started to read the paper. All of a sudden this woman appears out of the door and is shrieking that when she called to cancel the dispatcher told her he wouldn't take the cancellation, she'd have to tell the driver herself. Why they do this is beyond me. When someone is going to go out and cancel in person and give the driver something, they NEVER call, they just go out and say sorry about that and hand you money.

I wasn't real pleased. The lady was pissed. The moron in the office who refused to accept the cancellation wasted my time, and perhaps my miles, because I pay by the mile for miles about a certain amount, and that amount is almost always exceeded. So I said, "Thanks a lot JJ, next time just take the cancellation and tell me 22 got my call."

He comes back with he thought it was the right way to handle it, and I tell him he thought wrong, and give him guff over the radio for around an hour. I also wrote on the back of an authorization slip that I thought that practice was BS and it ought to stop. Take the cancellation and move on, right? I put the slip in my envelope without addressing it to anyone in particular and without signing it. It's in my handwriting, in my envelope. They KNOW who's note it is, and it is BS, and it does need to stop.

Next time I'm in the office, I say to Baldy, it ought to stop, and for this reason, and he says he agrees, and wants to know which dispatcher. I tell him point blank that he's asking me to rat out a friend, and if he wants to know bad enough he can go through the stack and find out who was on the board when that call was given out. But why not simply say, guys this is a bad practice, kindly stop doing it.

If one dispatcher is doing something like that, they all know about it, and they all know it's only one guy. Of it's SOP they all know it, or if it's SOP at night.......... You get the idea. So nobodies going to be offended if Baldy says guys this is a bad idea and we don't approve of it, whoever is doing it. And I'm not sure it's just one guy. It's a night time thing, but I never paid close enough attention to notice if it's only a single guy.

And this is what the fat man is screaming about, that he'd like me to leave the company. Leave the company? He screamed a lot of stuff, and he screamed it in front of other people, in the office. Back in the day, it wasn't cool to shriek fuck off at a driver inside the office, they had to do it out side. So I finally told the fat man which dispatcher, but I also wrote a verbose letter to his boss saying it was highly out of line.

20 years ago, outside the window at 12 (12 is the old old office, addressed 12 N. Few, these days called The Pigs Pen on the radio in memory of Piggy), the fat man was screaming at me. I can't recall what his problem was that day, but he was screaming me. And because he intended to scream like a lunatic and use words like fuck, he was doing it outside. He finished the screaming with the following quote, "I'll fuck you! You won't make any money! You'll quit!" At the time, he was one of the M-F 7am-3pm dispatchers. Back then we had 2, a much simpler radio set up, and more business than today. And as all you drivers know, if a dispatcher is allowed to screw over people they don't like, they can take money out of that drivers pocket.

Roy Boy always told me he didn't mean it. Well, he did. And he's been working at screwing me over for 20 years now. I guess we'll see if these days he has enough influence to get rid of me. I don't think he does. If he did, why would he scream about it, why not just do it. Well, fat man, do you have enough influence? I think Roy's going to tell him that he needs to let it go. Roy's going to know that he'll do his utmost to screw me over, and poor Roy is stuck in the middle. Roy is a saint. Baldy can't do his job, and when Roy leaves who knows what will happen. I don't even want to think about it.

By the way, I will be going through and weeding out some of the poorer quality posts, and trying to get this back up to something people would want to read. When I was out for 5 months I just didn't feel like working on it, I guess I need my family around. And I'm seeing new material that's worthy all of a sudden. Why just tonight I told Square Pants that he's luck that shit splatters, and he is. I'll tell you all why, perhaps next post.

It's football season again!

They say that the athletic paid the school that played over the weekend 1/2 million to come and play. That represents 1/2 of that small school's annual budget. The Anex didn't even bother having a beer garden after 9:00 pm. Were there the usual cast of drunken morons out taking cab rides? Well, does a bear crap in the woods? I actually did much better than I expected, I guess I was lucky. Judging by the frown on Fast Eddies face Friday and Saturday nights in the drivers room after work, I'm guessing he wasn't lucky.

This Saturday is Moo U. A snafu resulted in me getting taken off the schedule, and Dickie said he didn't know if he could find a spot for me.