Oh, the rain.
As if the Dreamforce convention wasn’t enough yesterday to keep me busy in the taxi, the first real rain of the winter came in fits and spurts all throughout my shift. Fifty to a hundred thousand convention goers clogging up Howard Street, doormen from every hotel blowing their whistles, and the normal hustle and bustle of The City trying desperately to get home amidst the clusterfuck that was downtown San Francisco yesterday was more than the entire taxi, limo and ridesharing businesses could handle yesterday.
Add a little rain and you get the scramble of thousands of people all wanting a taxi at exactly the same time.
While business was good, providing every cab driver with more customers, it also created a mess of an already messy situation. Given the scope of the convention, we didn’t need precipitation added to the mix – all it did was bog traffic down even further, making it harder to move around and get people where they were going. I picked up a couple from Folsom and Main at 7:30 yesterday and it took me almost twenty-five minutes to get them over to Cirque Du Soleil behind AT&T Park, and there were at least three other rides I had that took at least triple the time it should have taken.
When it rains, things get more complicated and harder to read.
The rain played a role in the guy I almost hit last night. Later on in the evening, a MUNI bus pulled away from the curb out in the Richmond and I crept alongside it to make a right at the red we were waiting at. As I approached the door, it suddenly sprang open and a kid stepped out into the lane. Thankfully I wasn’t going fast and hit the brakes immediately but I hydroplaned just a touch and he jumped forward, screaming and cursing, throwing his juice box at my cab as soon as he had gotten himself out of harm’s way.
While I’m glad I didn’t hit him, he would have been suing MUNI, not me. You sleep on your stop and ask to be let off the bus after its pulled away from the stop and the bus driver is stupid enough to let you off the 38 in the right turn lane… that’s MUNI’s fault, not mine, especially when the bus driver doesn’t even put his hazards on.
And then there was the girl who flagged me down at O’Farrell and Fillmore in the pouring rain, only to have a man step off the curb and jump in the car holding eighty pounds of drunk Asian girl, vomit streaking the side of her face before I could protest. She reminded me of Uma Thurman from the OD scene in Pulp Fiction and I explained that I’d take them if she didn’t throw up. He said he understood in heavily accented broken English. They were only going to the Inner Richmond, so I rolled the windows down and hoped for the best.
She didn’t move the entire time, looking as if the man in the back was holding a corpse. When we finally got to his house, I helped him take her out of the car and sit her on the porch, where she promptly slumped over and onto her back.
He gave me forty bucks and I asked him if he was sure I didn’t want to drive them to a hospital, but he shook his head no.
“Make sure she sleeps on her side – you don’t want her choking on her own vomit,” I said.
And the rain played a role in my ride home from the garage. It was coming down so hard that even in my heavy raingear, I decided to not tempt fate by riding a motorcycle on the freeway in the pouring rain at three o’clock in the morning.
I took a cab instead.
Speaking of which, I need to take another cab into work to go get another night of that Dreamforce money while it’s still here.
See you tomorrow blog.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
