Manila Cab Chronicles: Intro

I’ve been a daily taxi rider for more than three years now -- I take a cab every morning going to work. Every day I get to banter with a different driver about topics like politics, the economy, work, the daily life, karma, family and romance and even sex.

The usual morning ride starts, of course, with hailing a cab which, for a perennial office late-comer like me, means that I always have to choose the perfect spot at specific times in the morning where the chances of getting an available taxi is very high – a bad decision usually results to a waiting time of at least thirty minutes before I hail a taxi.

This often happens on Monday mornings or the morning after a payday. Even I do manage to hail a cab on these days, the driver shuns to accommodate me after I tell him my destination which is typically about 30 to 40 minutes away from where I live. These picky cabbies usually reason out that they need to fetch some regular customer, or that his unit’s fuel wouldn’t last to reach the destination or that his taxi suddenly needs some repairs.

I do not let these types of taxi drivers ruin my mornings though. I just silently get off the cab, take a glance as it speeds off and reminds myself that the universe operates on the law of karma.

Three years of riding a cab, however, has given me that special instinct of picking the right place at the right time to get a taxi. As soon as I leave home and step out in the streets, I always get that feel for how the taxi situation would be for that day.

I normally sit in the front passenger seat. I think doing so makes the taxi driver feel at ease with me -- I try to send the impression that I’m treating the cabbie as my equal, as opposed to sitting at the back seat which probably signals bossiness and arrogance to the driver. I think regular male cab riders like me prefers to take the front instead of the back seat.

How I socialize with my morning cabdriver is usually indicative of how my whole day would be.