I'm so tired...

I'm so tired of getting calls to go to places where there is no job because someone was fucking with you, whether in the base control, or in a house adjacent to the one you've called to, and they're laughing at you behind the curtain. I had one of those in my last week driving.
Rathmines, beside the barracks. I'm called to an address, and when I get there, the number I've been given is a wrong one, and the house is empty. I wait, and call, and wait again and ring, and then drive away, exasperated at how someone can find it funny to ring a taxi and send the driver on a wild goose chase.
Once I got sent all the way to Dalkey to an address which didn't exist...

Sometimes i think it's someone in the base who just doesn't like me. But since I don't work for that company anymore, well, they've lost a good driver. I've moved on to better things, and they're still working in base control, playing their silly little tricks on other drivers. Or else, if it's not someone in base control, they're still doing whatever childish thing they were doing.

I'm so tired of reading the crap on the taxi.ie website. If you haven't been there,
pay a visit.
It's a lesson in the type of gobshitery that is endemic among taxi drivers in Dublin. Or maybe not. Maybe the site has just been hijacked by a whole bunch of loudmouths who sound off their anti-black, white-supremacist spoor at eachother. I hate it. I've tried to fight it, but it's a loosing battle.

I've given up driving. I'm only putting my reminiscences on this blog now.

A bad hair day.

A girl stops my taxi on the street, hand held aloft the proper way, not out like she is trying to stop a bus. When she sits in the back, she starts to sob quietly. I ask her what's bothering her and she tells me it's her hair. She has just come out of the hairdresser having had her hair done some way that isn't the way that she had wanted it to be done. She is totally devastated. Her hair is horrible, she says. Look at it, and she plucks at it as she examines it in her hand-held mirror. She couldn't go back to work, and has called in after the hair job was finished to say she feels ill and is going home. Home is near Phillpsburgh Avenue.
I look at her in the mirror. Her hair seems fine to me. It is shortish and blonde, and she is attractive, in a flirtatious Charlie-girl-type-of-a-way. When I say her hair is shortish and blonde, you have to remember that I'm a man, and that fact immediately limits my descriptive abilities where matters hirsute are concerned. I don't normally have long conversations about haircuts, but I'm in an empathetical mood and I decide to humour her.
_How did you want it cut? I ask and her answer seems to make some sort of sense, but as it's mostly given using adjacent finger positions and tufts of hair in various geometrical relationships, and I can't really drive and watch her in my rear view mirror, I don't really take it in.
I tell her I think it looks good the way it is, but she circumvents my feelgood tactics with a determination that shows she's going to think the worst no matter what I say. She even flirts briefly with the possibility of taking legal action, but I tell her that unless she has a record of what she asked them to do to her hair, and she can also prove that what she has got isn't it, she'll have a tough time. She falters at this point, and in the end I leave her in her misery, her fragile self-esteem in tatters despite my best intentions.