Anyway, the biggest part of the adjustment has been setting my sleep to turn around from the day sleeping I was doing before to crashing in the mid evening to getting up at 4. I can't go on less than 5 hours sleep and I think I finally got my minimum of 6 last night. Trying to roll into the rack at 11am for a 3 hour nap to extend my day just doesn't fuckin work and when I got up at 1, there was work waiting for me before 2 any damn way.
So, tomorrow, it's going to be a 12 hour day with a break in the middle to go to the yard, pay my lease and finish recording Sports Illustrated for the folks at Taping For The Blind. However, I'm only going to take that break long enough to do my "chores" instead of trying to catch some Zs.
Today broke down like this: 5a-9a, taxi; 9a-10, yard, carwash (free BTW, if you get it at the yard); 10a-1045a, partial recording at Taping; 1130-1300, attempted NAP... BUHLEETED!!! 1400-1730, taxi. So, in all that bullshit, there was really only about 7 and a half hours of work. In spite of the dorkyness of the day, it was as close to a full day as I've generated in a while. Tomorrow, I intend to keep the mission tighter and not sweat someone's "recommendations" about when I should take my breaks. As it is, on only 7+ hours of driving, I still generated better than a hundred bucks. Take away the lease and the gas cost of the day (including a wild goose chase that cost me an hour of drive time, 5 bucks in tolls and no fucking fare), I managed to pocket 60 bucks. I can only imagine what my profit will be when I find that "right" 12 hours to drive every day.
Now, in all fairness to the guy who gave me the advice, the dude is a guy who hustles downtown big time. He knows when all the people who fill the glass towers go to work, walk to lunch, and then what time things heat up downtown again. However, there's something about that routine that seems too "mechanical" to me... and I had a fare this afternoon that proved it's not all about the money.
This was my "60 the hard way." But first, the easyt
Basically, the easy fare of the day was this morning. I got a call from an apartment complex near my house and got there lickety split. 5am, I picked her up and she told me about an accident on the Sam Houston Tollway that would slow us down and that we'd have to use the feeder road to get to Highway 290 to get her to work. I got her there 3 minutes late in spite of the fact that the cops had really routed us out of the way. It was a half hour trip that bagged me 33 bucks. If every half hour of the day was that profitable, I'd be buying myself a Lincoln Navigator and turning it into a taxi cab like that other guy I hear about... dude must be a legend with a big base of personal customers. I shit you not.
My first job after my "midday break" was a fucking ghost chase and a lesson in patience. Actually, it was the first half of my lesson in patience. One the ways a smart Houston cabbie can curry more work for himself is by using the zone information display on his dispatch terminal (or computer, for want of a better terminology). By checking the zone display, he can find out where people have called for cabs in areas where there may not be any sedans or vans. This is smart, but you have to be somewhat familiar with how the zones are laid out by their GPS zone numbers.
This is where I made my mistake... by bidding on something that was 25 minutes drive time away. I did this because no new dispatches were coming through the four to six GPS zones that were in my immediate area. OOPS
By the time I got there, not only was my fare not in the leasing office like he said he would be, but when I knocked on his apartment door I got a response from what was presumably a roommate like I was a cop trying to muff dive his meth lab or something.
"Who is it?!"
"Did you call a taxi, sir?" I asked the voice from behind the drawn blinds.
"Naw! He left awwready!"
"OK. Sorry to trouble you." And I went on my merry way.
Now, another lesson I learned in patience (I guess this would be the second quarter of the first half of my lesson) was that when you use the computer to tell the dispatcher that your fare bailed out on you, the dispatcher throws you a bone and puts you back into your previous position in the queue for your primary zone.
Problem: I did this while I was still 25 minutes drive time away from my former primary zone. And guess what, the guy ahead of me had a trip he got dispatched to, so.......
My computer yells at me, "You've got a trip, BOZO!"
Deftly donning my clown shoes and rubber nose (figuratively, of course), I drove back, paying the same tolls in the reverse direction. Luckily, I was against the commute this time, so it only took 18 minutes to get there. I apologized profusely to the little old lady and her caretaker who was accompanying her on the trip.
Side note: this is an issue because all of Houston's Yellow Cab fleet is GPS dispatched. Therefore, if you call for a cab, the dispatcher knows which vehicles are in which queue to go to a certain area. However, because of the "throwing of the bone" I mentioned before, I was automatically shuffled to the front of the line in a zone I was no longer in. Normally, when I'm booked into the right zone (which happens automatically, except in this case), I'm never less than 3-5 minutes from a fare (two of which is me looking up their address using either Yahoo Maps on my computer or my Key Map, travel time is hardly an issue in the GPS zones I operate in).
So, this is where I learned patience again... or rather, exercised it with a grin on my face. This little old lady had some banking business at not one, but two, banks. However, she wasn't content to tell me what her destinations were and let me determine how to get there in advance, she insisted on giving me the route on the fly. There was something about it, probably her accent, that gave this whole trip the whole "New York Hack" feel. She didn't want to know my name, and insisted on calling me "driver," which I actually thought was a hoot. There was more than one time when I would try to look up the street she was directing me to on my Key Map and she insisted on verbally reining me like a horse with a bowler-fedora on his head (that's the hat I wear when I drive). Funny thing is, I didn't really get irritated with it. Here I was, in a situation that in many another profession, I would probably be blowing my stack and telling this person to get off her high horse with me. But I was like, "Hell, as long as she's paying the freight, it's HER frickin car. I'll just point it where she wants it to go."
Mind you, this is an exception I made for a woman obviously in her eighties (if not her nineties) and was operating at differing levels of coherency from moment to moment. I figured, at the very least, between two banks she'd be able to scare up the cab fare. Kids in their teens and twenties sporting looks of being up to no good would not even have a sliver of a chance in hell of pulling that crap on me.
Anywho... I took granny sweetcakes (I knew her first name, but I'm withholding it here. On a trip like this, you're better off with "Ma'am" anyway) to her first bank and waited. It was my first trip clicking off "wait time," which in Houston is metered at 20 dollars an hour, and more specifically, 17 cents every 34 seconds. I had already driven 21 dollars worth of fare, and clicked off another ten while she waited to be waited on in the first bank. It was here that I noticed how quickly I'd made that first 33 dollars of the day, and how slowly this 31 had taken. Wait time is nothing to sneeze at, mind you, but I started to understand where some people who do this for a living really have their attitudes fail them. In a place like New York, I get it. They pay roughly the same leases, get roughly the same wait time, plus they only get to keep their cars for 12 hours and are stuck with those 12 hours to make or break their bank so to speak and the cost of living there is outrageous by comparison. We get our cars for 24 hours, get to pick which 12 hours make us the best money and aren't picking and snapping at flaggers nearly as much. In fact, the flagger is pretty much only a downtown phenomenon. But I digress.
Next, after the first bank was the drive to the second bank and her getting "lobby" treatment at the drive-thru window. In spite of the fact that the lobby wasn't open, a clerk still walked out to us at the drive-thru and helped her with her banking, because there was apparently some issue with conducting part of the transaction just using the window. I think they've dealt with her before and just know what's more expedient. It was cool in a way. Here I was, grinning my way through most of this, and all these other folks at these banks buzzing about her like she was a queen bee. Literally, it was like I had a makeshift dignitary in my cab.
Then, the drive home. She still insisted on asking which turns I was taking and why, even though we'd driven the way there and I was actually taking a shorter way back (my legal obligation, by the way). My explanations were greeted with terse "OKs" and an understanding that I probably couldn't botch the return trip. And lest we forget that she's operating at differing levels of awareness at any given time, she still didn't forget to ask for her senior citizen discount. Literally, two and a half hours of work that came to 60 bucks. That aint too shabby. And frankly, if I could multiply that into my 12 hour workday, making about $275-300 a day wouldn't hurt my feelings any even if part of that was the slow "wait rate." I figure at $106 a day when my lease goes up to the full rate still would give me 150+ per day. Spread that out over a week, and that's where I want my income to be.
However, not every trip is/was like that. Other than the 33 dollar job to start the day, and the 60 dollar job to almost finish it, there was the smattering of short trips and frankly, too many "no trips" where some bozo calls a cab and then decides to hoof it, hit the bus stop or otherwise not be there when the cab shows up. However, I could have also given myself a 17 hour day today to try and get those other 4 hours I didn't drive today.
The other thing is that I'm trying to find the right 8 hours to sleep. Specifically, the right block of time to get the 6 hard hours of sleep along with the dozing that invariably is part of nodding off beforehand and doing my little meditations. Doing the 17 is not my idea of getting that set correctly. If I hit the rack when I want to tonight, I'll have 16 to fit my 12 plus my recording and yard time in, plus a little play with the kitty time. And right now, that's all I really need.
On the whole, I'm enjoying this little adventure, and I'm thankful that Houston Yellow has this reduced lease program in place instead of throwing me to the wolves right away. If I had to give them a hundred bucks a day to start out, I would have said, "Yo, homes, smell ya later." Easing into this has really been far more preferable.
In fact, I hadn't even thought about blogging today until I ran aground on my banking granny today. Seriously, you don't make up stories like that. You live them.
And, of course... my daily LOLcat
moar funny pictures
-ManMan
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