From the moment I walk into the office in the morning to the moment I leave in the afternoon, my day is typically spent sitting behind a desk. Not counting my trips to the break room, bathroom, and my walks outside, my ass is pretty much glued to that chair from start to finish. For someone like me who likes to keep busy and stay on the move, you can imagine that this can get pretty unbearable at times. You can also imagine that when my office needed someone to run a simple work errand, I jumped on the chance to get out of the office like a frog jumps on a lily pad.
Typically, when our company needs to do business in other parts of the city, the offices we need to visit are pretty accessible as most of them are near metro stations. But of course, the office I needed to visit was no where near a metro station. If I had tried to take public transit, it would have taken me over an hour each way via train, bus, and on foot. That seemed a bit excessive - especially since I was only picking up a few things and wouldn't be at the office long at all - so to keep things simple, my boss kindly offered to pay for a cab. It would still be a 20 minute ride, but that was much better than an hour. "It'll be easy," he said. "Nice and simple," he said...
I knew I was in trouble when I got into the cab, gave the address, and the cabby said, "Where??"
No, he wasn't asking because he didn't hear me. He was asking because he literally had no idea where I was talking about. You have got to be kidding me...
Not only did he have no idea where he was going, but he didn't even have a GPS in his car. So, while he grumpily called his taxi buddies to help him out (it turns out they weren't very helpful, either), I pulled up the address on my phone and told him where to go. When we got to my location, I asked him to wait and told him I would be about 10-15 minutes. "Fine," he said, "I'll wait 15 minutes." When I came out (right around 15 minutes later) he said, "I was getting impatient!" What are you complaining about, jerk? I'm paying you aren't I?? Once again, you have GOT to be kidding me. At that point I didn't even bother having him drive me all the way back to my office. I just told him to take me to the closest metro station and I would get back from there. I didn't care that I had a rather awkward box to carry and had to now traverse the city in heels (thank goodness they weren't super high heels) -- no more crazy cab rides for me.
Sadly, this is not the first poor experience I have had with a DC area cab. When I was still living at home, there were a couple times I got home late and had to take a cab from the metro back to my house -- 5 minutes away -- and the cabbies didn't even recognize the streets I was mentioning. Sigh....
Maybe it's just my imagination, but shouldn't a cab driver know the streets of the city s/he is driving in? Are my expectations too high? Maybe I'm comparing too many of my taxi experiences to the awesome taxis I took in Spain. After all, I never took cabs on my own before living overseas, so my first experiences with taxis were when I was living in Valencia -- and I have to say, Valencian taxis are pretty awesome.
While I didn't take them all that often, Valencian taxis never disappointed me. Whether I had just missed the bus or didn't want to walk back from my friends' apartment at 3 AM, they were always very handy. They were relatively cheap, efficient, and the cabbies always knew where they were going. On the rare occasions they didn't know where they were going, they had a GPS to help them along the way (fancy that, modern technology...). And for the cherry on top, the cabbies were always really nice and were so much fun to talk to in my spotty Spanish.
When I told a friend about my varying cab experiences, she mentioned that good taxis aren't just a European trend - that New York City is another place where cab drivers actually know where they're going. It turns out that once again, my expectations really aren't too high. DC transportation is just terrible as usual.
Disclaimer: Yes, I realize this post is the epitome of First World Problems. I know that there are many more worse things in the world that could happen (and are happening) than me having a bad taxi experience. Just trying to keep things a little more light-hearted.
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