The board.

Back in the day, the board was a clip board, now it's the desktop in front of the guy on the radio. On it he has all the slips for the rides that haven't been assigned, laid out sort of like a game of solitare. There will be single slips, and little columns of slips. A column of slips is a run. An example of a run might be these calls, 820 Williamson to 1400 Regent, The Comeback to Ian's, and The Cardinal (2) to Wando's. That run would be 4 people, a load. The dispatcher would read it off as, "3 calls, a load, starting in the 800 Willimason, ending the stadium."


The guy answering the phone writes down the time, the source of the ride, the destination, and number of people on a 3" x 3" slip of paper. The pad of paper is on a clip board. He rips the slip off and slides it through an opening like a tellers window, this is refered to as sliding it through or sliding it under the glass. So when the dispatcher says, "And sliding across is.....", that's a brand new call.


Back in the day, the same guy answered the phone and handled the radio. All the rides he needed to assign would fit under a rubberband that they had on the clipboard running from top to bottom. When there were no slips under the rubber band, you had a clear board. The rubber band is still there today, but only when it's really really slow do slips ever get tucked under it. Today, clear board still means no slips, but what they're really talking about is the desktop in front of the dispatcher.

Have I ever read off the board? Sure. Every driver who is willing to sit behind that mike for a minute has. Can I read it off fast? About the 3rd time I read the same board off, I can say it pretty fast. Can I dispatch competently? No.

When drivers bid on the calls on the board, frequently 2 or more drivers will try to talk at the same time. This results in garbled transmission, much like AM radio with one station washing over another. So the dispatcher will hear a little sliver of a voice he knows, and he'll come back with, "Come in 80." 80 will come in and tell him what he's doing and where he is, and if he heard another voice, or a little piece of a number, he'll then perhaps say, "Now try it number ending in 3." 63 will respond. Then he might say, "Try it R. C.", and I'll come in. Then he may say, "try it even number in the 90's." Dispatching isn't easy when it's busy.

Hammer

When he started, he was a frat boy from Acacia. 2 of them started together, he and Chris. Chris graduated and found himself a real job. Hammer hung around like so many of us and drove cab. Like a number of people, he wanted to be one of the office types, he wanted that real bad. It's easy to see why people want to be dispatchers, there aren't enough good days to compensate for the bad days, compounded by the common American inability to save and manage money. This is probably why, when Bobby trained me, he said that in general people who couldn't drive became dispatchers. Hammer the driver, was pretty bland.

I remember his first ever shift dispatching. He screwed up a Friday rush hour worse than any I've ever seen before or since. He was working with T-fuss, and Big T is a pretty easy going guy, so what probably happened was he announced that he was going to take the radio from 3 until 7, and T let him. He of course knew how he was going to change the system. He'd already picked out his own nickname. He was Hammer, and he was going to hammer out those calls. What did he do? He put all the calls out on an oldest first basis. He wouldn't give out any fresh calls until the old ones were gone. It was a fall day, and it was spitting snow, and he was giving out runs of passenger calls that were all 45 minutes old. If you didn't take them, and try to load them, you got nothing. From 3:30 until 5:00 I did nothing but drive around, wait for 5 minutes, get no passenger, drive to the next one, and so on.

Back then, I was even a highly cooperative driver. I pretty much did what a dispatcher wanted. Try striking out for 90 minutes straight when it's insanely busy, and you know theres one simple reason for the problem, the dispatcher. If you think about it, it's bad for business too. The people who'd called an hour ago didn't get service, nobody got service, and none of the drivers made any money. I finally keyed the mike and told him he was the worst dispatcher I'd ever heard, and it was the truth, on that afternoon he was the worst, in his own league. This started a problem between me and him that lasted for over 10 years.

My thinking has long been that everyone gets treated the same. Rich passengers, poor passengers, flags, and people who called on the phone, all want to go somewhere and pay me for taking them there. The people in the office frequently don't see it that way. People who called on the phone are our customers, they deserve rides, and only if there's nothing else to do does anybody else deserve a ride.

The height of the rift between Hammer and I happeened around bar time one terribly busy weekend night, back before Hammer got married. I heard the call on the board before I saw him, it was State and Gilman going to 800 S. Brooks. I was working flags as I usually did, and I just couldn't resist, stopping and saying hi. I rolled up to him in the intersection, and he said, "You better be here to take my call."

I said, "I'd like to help you but I can't because you called for a ride over the phone." Then I drove a car lenght or 2 away and loaded up with flags, and was off on my way. The driver who did take him home said that he was pretty agitated all the way home, saying he was going to screw me over for the rest of my life. He was already doing that anyway, so I didn't see it making any difference.

This went on for a few years and then they made him the general manager of the company, answering only to Roy Boy and the owner. I was sure he'd get rid of me, Roy always said he wouldn't, and he did mellow with age finally. I was actually sorry to see him leave in 2006 when he wangled himself a pretty nice position with a large public agency. He came back and did a cameo appearance, dispatching for the Penn State game a few weeks ago. He hadn't been on the air for 2 minutes and he was yelling at people, I keyed the mike and said, "It's good to hear your voice Hammer. I've missed you." With that, I loaded up with flags and drove them home.

The Hog

He's dead. He died last year. He was a dispatcher. His name was Aurther Phillip Penn III, Phil Penn. Pig Pen. Piggie. The school marm. We did not get along.

The drivers out there are probably saying to yourselves, well if you're a real cab driver why would you ever have an enemy among dispatchers? You just have to do it. There's a limit to the abuse you can take. Dispatchers handing out abuse? Nah, never happen. Yeah, and while we're telling lies, I just happen to own this swamp in Arizona I have for sale.

The Hog had a lot of tattos, and of course he had Piggie tattoed on his left arm.

We don't have forced dispatching. What that means is, if I don't want to do that ride, I don't have to. I can be empty, I can be right across the street from the ride, there can be no other cab within 30 minutes of that call, and there's nothing the dispatcher can do about it, if I don't want to do that ride. This is the issue the Hog and I parted ways over. When he sat down he figgured he was god. If he said you had to do a ride, that was it, you had to do it. In the long run, it probably cost me thousands of dollars to refuse to do a few dozen rides, but learning how to get along with dispatchers is part of the game. To any aspiring driver, NEVER antagonize a dispatcher. They all know me, so I couldn't take my own advice even if I wanted to, at this point in my career.

Around 10:55 pm on Saturday nights, Curly would always say, "And now, here's the kinder, gentler, School Marm", and the gravely voice would begin reading off the board. Curly really looked up to Piggie, and used him as a role model. Curley was the artistic inspiration for the movie character, Jaba the Hut, he used to say he wanted to eat until he exploded, and his face looked like a pepperoni pizza. I'll do a post about Curley some time.

School Marm? He had a degree in education. He was qualified to be a French teacher, but never worked in that capacity. It might have been his other exploits in life that made him unqualified to teach. Cab driving has always been a place where people with a prison record or dishonorable discharge could still find a job. He liked to play pool. His memoriam was a Piggie Penn Memorial Pool Tournament at Blue Chalk. I did not attend. He also liked bending the rules (cheating in a business of cheating). Years ago, we had an account with ChiNor, which were almost all $100+ rides. It turns out that one of his pals at the pool hall was a ChiNor employee who'd tip him off on the up coming rides which he camped on when he was driving. He was pretty proud of his inside info, and flaunted it.

Now that he's gone, dispatching has changed, it's gotten more impartial, more honest. It needed to happen. It took way to many years to happen.