Taxis, what a well of anecdotes! From that time, in Eastern Europe, we were ripped off and paid a fortune for a ridiculous distance, to the typical night trip where someone said something silly and we couldn't stop laughing the whole way. We all remember some conversation with a taxi driver, and it's curious, because we surely don't have similar war stories with train or bus drivers, and we use them much more frequently.
A taxi is an automatic story generator, and if the taxi driver is talkative and extroverted – as most are – the experiences accumulate infinitely. During the golden age of Catalan blogs, taxi driver Xavier Gonzàlez wrote every morning about how his night shift had gone. The Ddriver blog was a goldmine of taxi anecdotes, and it was also full of sociological observations, tips for finding a taxi on complicated days, and adventures with eccentric passengers. There we discovered that the daytime and nighttime faunas are quite different, since by day the clientele consists of workers and tourists, of course, but also the endearing old folks who go for a check-up at the clinic or the grandpas who go to bother the bank. At night, however, the clientele is younger, people going out to party or coming back, with a pile of rides to nightclubs or brothels. Along these lines, the blog uninhibitedly explained the murky world of commissions that some restaurants and brothels pay taxi drivers if they bring them clientele, and also described the specimens of the Mobile World Congress, such as the Asians who, in the midst of a binge, can leave tips of 100 euros. It also portrayed other types of tips – the gastric ones, you'll understand why I'm not more explicit – and documented couples who couldn't hold back and had an orgy in the back seats.
I once met an American playwright who worked as a taxi driver in the summers, but not for the occurrences, but for the accents. He walked the streets of New York with a recorder under the seatIn his texts –where his sense of humor compensated for some spelling errors–, Xavi also analyzed some of the usual behaviors in taxis, such as those who try to maintain the typical conversation about the weather –don't do it, the driver is a taxi driver, not Tomàs Molina– or those people who stare at the taximeter, "as if waiting for a movie to start on the screen." While preparing this text, I wrote him an email and Xavi explained to me that, despite closing the blog in 2015, he continues to drive a taxi, 26 years later. Of course, you have to imagine him at the antipodes of the taxi driver with COPE on the speakers and a crucifix on the rearview mirror: he has even made customers get out of the car if they laughed at independentism or insulted Barça or the culés. But good stories don't just come from taxis. I once met an American playwright who worked as a taxi driver in the summers, not for the anecdotes, but for the accents. He would drive around the streets of New York with a recorder under the seat, and when a client with an interesting way of speaking got in –a Jew saying "Schmuck!" every three sentences or a Texan who slurs his words–, he would press REC on the recorder and make them chat for the entire ride. Afterwards, he would transcribe the best inflections and steal their words and expressions to transfer them to his characters. The problem came when an Italian-American who looked like a mobster discovered the recorder with a kick: the capo stopped the taxi, smashed the device against the sidewalk, and my friend almost ended up with a bullet between his eyes, unable to explain that he wasn't a cop, just a sad accent hunter.